Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [153]
When Mrs Todd alleged that Miss Dickinson had agreed that the deed was to be ‘a secret from everybody a long time’, Miss Vinnie denied it emphatically. ‘No, sir, I never did anything of the kind.’
Where her opponent lied without hesitation, Mabel stuck as close as she could to the truth without disclosing her liaison. She was on the defensive, speaking more hesitantly than her wont, in contrast to Miss Vinnie’s assured delivery. ‘I think . . . it could have been . . .’, she said as she picked her way through qualifications.
She was too astute not to realise when the case slid towards the cliff-edge of adultery, held back out of respect for Austin Dickinson and public propriety. Miss Dickinson dared to walk that edge in her reply to a question whether she had ‘invited’ Mrs Todd into her house.
‘I can’t tell. She always came,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell whether I asked her because she was in the habit of coming.’
Ned Dickinson, who had been in love with Mabel before his father came into play, sat with his sister behind their aunt. From behind he was in a position to guide her with a whisper in her ear. Though he could not forgive Lavinia (he saw the trial as ‘a good lesson to her’), Ned acted as Aunt Lavinia’s man. This was his chance for retribution.
To win the day it was necessary to erode Mabel’s claim on the land as compensation for her editing of Emily Dickinson. Taking her turn on the witness stand, Miss Vinnie denied flatly any such understanding. ‘She never talked with me about its being pay for copying my sister’s poems. There was never any talk of that kind between me and Mrs Todd.’
Her testimony scaled down Todd’s editorial role. ‘Mrs Todd asked the privilege of doing it,’ she recalled. ‘I wished [the poems] copied. Mrs Todd copied them. . . . We always used the words my sister tried first. She sometimes had others, and put crosses down for reference, but we always decided to use the first choice.’ The collaborative ‘we’ took a stand against Todd’s rightful ‘I’ claim to discriminating initiatives and professional expertise. Miss Vinnie conceded that she did not select the first volume of poems, but after that she had shared in the selection of poems for publication. ‘The second and third volumes were the ones I chose,’ she said. ‘I furnished the letters.’
But then Mabel went so far as to claim that ‘Emily’ had actually asked her to edit her poems.
Mr S. S. Taft of Springfield, a well-informed member of the Dickinsons’ legal team, cross-questioned Mrs Todd about her supposed closeness to the poet:
TAFT: You never saw Miss Emily Dickinson?
TODD: Except as I saw her flitting through a dark hall.
TAFT: You never saw her to speak to her?
TODD: She has spoken to me.
TAFT: You never saw her to speak to her?
TODD: I never spoke to her.
Vinnie and Ned had primed their legal team with Mabel’s habits of acquisition. Emily Dickinson’s death came up in court because the family was pointing to a pattern of behaviour: the fact that the Todds’ land claims followed a Dickinson death, first Emily’s, then Austin’s.
‘Was the original deed signed also by Miss Dickinson’s sister?’ Mabel was asked on the witness stand.
‘Yes,’ she lied.
Nothing was said explicitly about the family disagreement implied by Emily’s refusal to deed the first plot of land to Mrs Todd, yet the force of this act of inaction was kept to the fore through the tenacity with which the Dickinsons’ counsel fixed on a link between Emily’s death and the Todds’ acquisition. In the face of this pressure, Mabel’s testimony tried to fudge her acquisition of Dickinson land for The Dell. The Dickinsons had ‘sold’ it, she’d stated in the Defendants’ Answer. They had ‘bought’ it, she repeated in court.
Lavinia’s counsel