Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [154]
This is where Mabel faltered. Uneasy and on the defensive, she prevaricated. She claimed that she did not know whether the plot was ‘bought’ or not. It had been a transaction carried out between Austin Dickinson and her husband - nothing, then, to do with her. It was crucial to throw the court off the scent. Contrary to Mabel’s display of widow’s weeds two and a half years earlier, she now had to distance herself from Austin. Land must not be seen to be a gift of love. Quick to pick up the drift of the lawyer’s questions, but wary of lying outright, Mabel could not, it appeared, recall exactly when the plot was obtained (even though she herself, in filling out the deed for the second plot, had set down the precise date of the first deed, 8 June 1886, a mere three weeks after Emily Dickinson’s funeral).
Taft wanted to know if she had built her house ‘after the death of Miss Emily?’
‘I think the foundations were dug before she died. She died in May, 1886. I think it was dug in April.’
‘That [plot] came to you from the Dickinson estate?’
‘It did.’
‘How much did you pay for that?’ Taft pounced.
‘The deed says twelve hundred dollars,’ Mabel hedged.
Taft was not to be deflected. ‘Whether anything was paid or not, you don’t know?’
She stuck to her story. ‘The first I knew was when Mr Todd told me he had bought the lot and we should have a house there.’
‘The deed is in your name?’ Taft pressed her.
‘The deed is in my name. Mr Todd wished to have it so.’
David Todd, summoned to the witness stand, was compelled to come clean with the facts.
‘How much did you pay for your house?’
‘The deed . . .’ David hedged.
‘No,’ Taft cut in. ‘How much did you pay for it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And you got it when?’
‘In . . .’ David hesitated. He could not bring himself to contradict his wife. He was willing to confirm her evidence that the land came their way in 1886. ‘I can’t give you the date within three months.’
‘After Miss Emily died?’ Mr Taft leant into this question as though he had the answer already. For David to deny this fact would be worse than futile.
‘I should say yes.’
The courtroom was crowded on 3 March when the Todds’ main witness, Mr Spaulding, took the stand. The scene in question turned on how the lawyer had cautioned Miss Vinnie. Mr Spaulding insisted that he had done so; she claimed to have heard nothing. The fact is that she was not sitting opposite him in a law office; there would have been little if any eye contact, with Mr Spaulding intent on the china; and his tone was likely to have been routine, rather automatic, believing as he did (from Mrs Todd) that the two women were agreed. His manner, Miss Vinnie said repeatedly, was social, not legal. Indeed, to the lawyer from Northampton these were not his clients; he was doing a favour to Bumpus of Boston, whose say-so, as conveyed by Mrs Todd, had reassured Timothy Spaulding that to witness the deed was a mere formality; and Bumpus at that date had known only what Mrs Todd had told him. Before he was enlightened by Maggie’s deposition, his recommendation of a local colleague had been a favour to an attractive woman.
Miss Vinnie’s counsel probed this web of favours when they asked Mrs Todd if Mr Spaulding, travelling from Northampton at her request, did this ‘without compensation’?
‘Mr Spaulding never sent any bill.’
One further fact revealed by Spaulding again took the court close to that cliff-edge of adultery. Asked what reason Mrs Todd gave him for not wanting the deed to be recorded at once, Spaulding mentioned ‘her estrangement with the family of Austin Dickinson’.
Taft’s summing-up savaged Mrs Todd for an hour: ‘pounded’ she felt ‘in the face’. The Republican, convinced, commended Taft’s ‘lucid’ solution