Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [149]
‘She did know it, but did not like it.’
All this was disagreeable news to Bumpus, and he could neither stop it coming nor shake Maggie’s integrity.
Did Maggie tell Miss Dickinson what she’d seen at The Dell?
‘I never did.’
‘You kept on working there afterwards?’
‘Yes sir, I did.’
‘I understand from your answers that you did not mention the kissing to Miss Dickinson and you remained in [Mrs Todd’s] employ in spite of what you saw there?’
‘I knew I was obliged to stay in her employ. I was doing it for Miss Dickinson, when Mrs Todd was working on the poems.’
Annoyed to have got nothing useful for the defence, Mr Bumpus tried confrontation. ‘Isn’t it a fact that you and Miss Dickinson have talked this matter over a great many times and you have told her in substance what you would testify to?’
Maggie stood her ground. ‘No, sir. I have nothing to testify to but the truth.’
Austin and Mabel had enjoyed long drives in the country, sometimes in summer making love on the way. When Hammond enquired into these, Maggie said the pair often went out, mostly in the afternoon but sometimes for a whole day. ‘Mr Dickinson would ask if she was ready, and she would answer, “Yes, always ready.” I heard these things myself. Mr Dickinson asked Miss Lavinia and me to put up a lunch. We always put it up.’ When they went in the afternoon they didn’t come back until eight or nine at night.
Maggie’s witness to these habits had the power to erode Mrs Todd’s contention that Austin Dickinson had wished to give her land as compensation for her work on his sister’s writings. Mabel Todd took every opportunity to stress her special relationship with Emily Dickinson. Maggie was emphatic in her denials that any such a relationship existed. This, ironically, was established by Mrs Todd’s counsel, Bumpus, as he tried to firm up the basis of her defence: the intimacy with the poet behind Todd’s work on the manuscripts.
‘Was Mrs Todd intimate with Miss Emily Dickinson?’
‘No. She was not.’
‘Was she acquainted with her?’
‘No. Only through notes.’
Bumpus questioned Maggie’s own tie. ‘Did you have anything to do with the poems or know where she kept them during her lifetime?’
‘She kept them in my trunk.’
‘How were they arranged or done up?’
‘They were done up in small booklets . . . tied together with a string.’
The interview with Maggie Maher was long and probing. The result was remarkably consistent. It proved, first, the poet’s trust in her servant in contrast to the distance she had put between herself and Mabel Todd. Secondly, it proved that the gift of land could not be dissociated from sexual favours. From the time this deposition was taken, it became as clear as Lavinia had intended that the forthcoming case about land was really about adultery.
13
THE TRIAL
Maggie’s evidence handed the Dickinsons a loaded gun. They had the ammunition to shoot down the Todds, but it would have been unthinkable to shame Austin in public. It sufficed that this gun was to hand in the course of the trial to come. Even before the trial opened it had an impact on Mr Bumpus who understood, better than Mabel, how questionable was a gift of land that a lover meant to take from his rightful heirs in order to content a mistress. As the trial approached the good Bumpus backed away when he could, wary of his reputation.
How far Mabel grasped the effect of Maggie’s disclosures remains doubtful. Later, when years had passed and facts had dimmed, Mabel would call Maggie a ‘fool’, an ‘Irish Paddy’, a nonentity who had told ‘a pack of lies’. She denied Maggie’s statement that she had played and sung to Austin at The Evergreens when his family was away. Mabel said she could recall only one occasion when she was there in the absence of the family, and Mattie Dickinson had locked the piano, so playing would have been impossible. A glance at the deposition filled her with such ‘disgust’ she did not care to read it.
Mabel resolved to sue Lavinia for slander and David Todd agreed. He was fond of Lavinia but, included as he was in the allegation of fraud, his blood