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The other observation came from a lawyer’s feeling that a sensible landowner does not give away valuable land for nothing. There was a weakness in a defence depending on a say-so from Austin Dickinson, who could have acted himself at any time before his death. What Austin Dickinson had wished and what the present owner wished were not identical.

‘Seldom is there a case in which the reasons for a rule that weight should be given to the impressions produced by seeing and hearing the witnesses are so strong as in this case,’ Holmes reflected. He was alert to the subtleties of ‘temperament’ and states of mind. It was indeed a case in which the routines of the law came up against a situation as intricate as any in novels of Henry James, where the greatest force lies in what is hidden. The outsiders who comprised the Supreme Court had to consider a clash of irreconcilable testimonies: did ‘Miss Vinnie’ lie on the witness stand? Did Mrs Todd have the stronger case, as she had reason to believe? They had to elicit the truth from an unmentionable but pertinent history of adultery, a concealed family schism and shaded characters with their moral ambiguities.

Holmes had been close to Henry James during their youth in Boston in the mid-1860s. At that time, James had dropped out of his law studies at Harvard in favour of literature, with its more inclusive approach to truth than the binary right or wrong, guilty or not guilty of the courtroom. Holmes rose to what might be called the Jamesian challenge in this case, conceding, up to a point, his court’s limitations.

‘Habits of life’, he directed, must determine judgement, and these a local court was better placed to discern. The outcome, on 21 November 1898, was to uphold the earlier judgement. The Todds, finally defeated, had to return the land and, once more, pay the costs: $86.73.

‘Habits of life’ picked up Miss Vinnie’s coded words for adultery. Mrs Todd was ‘in the habit of coming’ to the home of the Dickinson sisters as a safe place for assignations. What did not happen in court - the force of unexploded facts - turned the case into a judgement of character. So it was that the character of Mabel Loomis Todd in the familiar story of adultery triumphed over a rare story: her rescue of Emily Dickinson.

‘I am perfectly crushed,’ Mabel said the day the verdict came. For all her outward aplomb she had been all year as sensitive as a leaf. She had felt like a ballet dancer who has to be light and graceful with a chain around her ankle. ‘I shall die standing,’ she told herself. ‘There will be no weak admission that persecution has killed me.’

14

DEFEATS OF THE FIRST GENERATION

After Mabel lost the case she was finished with the Dickinsons. She would have nothing more to do with them, she told herself, but this did not include returning the Dickinson manuscripts.

In 1897, with the case on the boil, confidence bubbling and the steam of her own slander action on the rise, Mabel Todd had still meant to edit a fourth volume of poems, or so she said in court in 1898. But then, when the judgement went against her, she stashed the manuscripts in a Chinese camphorwood chest and locked the lid on a huge cache of 665 poems as well as assorted letters, both those she’d selected for publication and those she’d left out. And there the treasure slept, untouched, unseen, as the seasons and firmaments wheeled round. Years, then decades passed. No one but Mabel Todd knew where the treasure lay. No one spoke of it. Memories dimmed and many who remembered died.

Mabel was not the only loser. The case hurt the winners as well, in the long run more painfully. The Dickinsons shrank from ‘the disgrace of dragging the family name into court’. In the run-up to the trial, Susan, Mattie and Ned had escaped to Europe, but Ned had not been happy. He felt alien to the American men who idled in the Old World. On his return he had to take up the case against the temptress who had fanned his first romantic feelings and then destroyed his family. He sank into