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This was not the end of it. In 1905, Mabel visited a medium who spelt Lavinia’s name backwards and told Mabel that this woman from the spirit world, with beautiful dark hair falling about her, was clasping Mabel’s knees and begging forgiveness for treachery.

‘Let her entreat,’ Mabel said. The scene left her ‘furious’.

The case left no winners, and, trailing in its wake, two deaths. It could be said the case was a killer - no less than Jarndyce and Jarndyce, destroying the litigants in Bleak House. ‘Whole families have inherited legendary hatred with the suit.’ Mabel chose to read this novel during her own legal drama. In life, as in Dickens, there is the obfuscation of truth, deferring justice. The quarrel goes on from generation to generation, the principals die, hearsay takes over, the fog thickens. Where the fog lies thickest the divided treasure, fading from memory, sleeps on.

Two of the first generation survived into the twentieth century: Mabel Todd, who was only forty-two at the time of the trial, and Susan Dickinson, by then sixty-eight. Susan, the youngest of the seven Gilbert orphans, was the last to remain alive. Soon after Austin’s death in August 1895 her sister Martha sickened in their home town of Geneva in upstate New York. Susan was there to nurse her. Martha Gilbert, who had been in love with Austin in the early 1850s, and a girlhood confidante of Emily Dickinson, died that autumn. After Lavinia’s death in 1899, a question arises about Susan. Lavinia, like her father, left no will, and this meant that all her property, including the rights in the Dickinson manuscripts, went to her next of kin at The Evergreens. If two parts of the treasure were buried and hidden, Susan had, we recall, her own hoard, and had long wished to publish these poems and letters. So why, now, didn’t she?

There’s no obvious reason why Susan should not have become an editor. As she grew old she did go on to publish stories and sketches, none of them superior to her vivid memoirs of Amherst, humorous letters and piercing obituary of Emily Dickinson. At the turn of the twentieth century the vogue for Dickinson seemed to be over. When David Todd said this to console Mabel, he voiced a current opinion. Dickinson’s poems didn’t go out of print - there were reissues - but when Little, Brown took over Roberts Brothers in 1899 they would have noted the poor sales of the two more recent publications. Todd’s selection of the Letters had indeed sold quickly, on the strength of enthusiasm for the poems, but the publishers had not recovered their costs. Quirky and poetic, the Letters had needed more biographical context, while Poems: Third Series suffered, inevitably, when Todd’s customary promotion was stopped by Lavinia’s Bill of Complaint in November 1896 (yet another sign of Lavinia’s oblivion to what Todd had contributed). All through 1897 Todd chose to lecture on Japan and kept off the subject of Emily Dickinson.

So, for want of confidence or some other reason, Susan’s trove, the third part of the divided treasure, slept on at The Evergreens, while Susan travelled four times to Europe for prolonged stays. Her daughter Mattie accompanied her, in soft white frocks with a bared forehead and Austin’s down-turned mouth. Her look was serious, verging on sombre. Austin’s rejection of his daughter, along with his son, had left its mark on Mattie. After her schooling at the socially elite Miss Porter’s, Mattie became an accomplished pianist and writer, and in her thirties published a collection of poems. They were competent, without her aunt’s genius. Readers thought the poems sad. ‘Life isn’t merry’, she admitted to Amy Angell Collier, a friend of her Geneva days, in 1900. After that she wrote romantic novels in which American girls try out the company of European grandees. This was the scenario for her own romance.

In March 1902, at the age of thirty-six, Mattie ‘broke down’, she confided a month later to Ned’s friend Theodore Frothingham. Attempting an airy