Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [147]
Witnesses gathering for the defence were not the only reason that Lavinia found herself in a weak position. Mabel Todd was holding on to a massive cache of about six hundred poems as well as a hoard of Dickinson letters. Mabel entertained certain notions about her rights, a residue perhaps of promises Austin had made, assuming the power to control Lavinia even as that power was fading. Mabel continued to believe in the validity of the draft contract of 1894 that had granted her half the copyright in Dickinson letters, and she continued to believe as well (or so she said later) in an improbable notion that Lavinia had made a will before Austin died, leaving Mrs Todd substantial rights in the whole Dickinson oeuvre.
Mabel was able to retain the manuscripts, since Lavinia had willingly handed them over. To Lavinia, of course, it was merely a loan. The papers were at The Dell so that Todd could go on with their long-term project of editing as many as ten volumes. What Lavinia did not consider, or not enough, was that the public humiliation of the editor might affect their future project. Lavinia took the view that to edit Emily Dickinson was an honour. She did not pick up on the shortness of cash in Todd’s household, an oblivion soothed by Mabel’s pride in drawing a genteel veil over the matter of money, much as her mother had done.
The stress of Lavinia’s leap across the fissure, followed by preparations for legal battle, affected Lavinia’s heart. Her physician declared her unfit for a trial. At different times, Bumpus tried to settle out of court: if Mabel would return the land and the Dickinson papers then Lavinia would drop her charge.
‘All right,’ Mabel agreed, ‘but never until she admits on paper that she accused me falsely.’ It would have to be ‘an entire retraction’.
David said, ‘We have too good a case. I intend to go through with it.’ Yet for all the strength of the evidence in the Todds’ favour, there was a flaw in the case for the defence.
Astonishingly, it seems not to have occurred either to Mabel or David that a person with a secret who cares about hiding it for the sake of her reputation should not stand trial. When Bumpus, acting as Mrs Todd’s counsel, initially encouraged litigation he did not, it seems at that stage, know that Austin had wrested the prior plot of land from an unwilling family as a gift for Mrs Todd once Emily Dickinson was out of the way. No one outside the family knew that immediately following his sister’s death, when Austin had signed over the plot to his mistress, Susan Dickinson had shut herself in her room. She did not emerge for a day or two, helpless to defend her children against a father who repudiated them: ‘They never were my children,’ he told Mabel. Bumpus had no idea of the bitterness festering at The Evergreens for ten years since this ill deed in June 1886. Nor did Bumpus know for some time that Austin’s decision to give Mrs Todd a second gift of land went back to November 1887 - that is, before she began assigned work on the Dickinson papers.
The case due for February 1897 was postponed till the autumn, and then postponed again. Meanwhile, on 28 May of that year, a private cross-examination took place that was to have an immeasurable effect on the trial to come. Lavinia’s counsel, Mr J. C. Hammond, and Mabel’s counsel, Mr Bumpus, came to Northampton to take a deposition from Lavinia’s chief witness, Maggie Maher, who was leaving Massachusetts for a while and might not return in time for the trial.
The defence was up against a forty-three-year-old Irishwoman who since the age of twenty-eight had stood by Lavinia Dickinson in all she had done for the comfort and care of her parents and sister. Having lived at the Homestead for these years, since 1869, Maggie had seen and heard at close quarters what there was to see and hear from the time Mabel began to use the house on