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By Root 686 0

tone, she’d had, she adds, ‘a bully time killing myself ’. Her doctor ordered her to take a year’s rest abroad, and in July this shaky woman sailed for Europe. She could afford it: as the last of the Dickinson line she had inherited everything her grandfather, father and aunts had owned. Before sailing, at a New York party she met Captain Alexander Emmanuel Bianchi (sometimes known as Count Bianchi). His name sounds Italian, but he was echt Russian, he said, and appointed by his country’s government to a post in Boston - an odd place for a diplomat or emissary. Why not Washington or New York? What Mattie saw, however, was a cultivated European who played the cello. His military position, he claimed, had been earned in the Imperial Horse Guards of the Russian army. He owned an array of uniforms: in one, he appears in a double-stitched, double-breasted coat with many buttons, epaulettes on the shoulders and dark stripes on the collar. One hand carries a hard cap; the other is tucked in his pocket with just the thumb showing. His hair looks as though two brushes have stroked it, and his moustache is trained to steely points on either side of his mouth. It’s the image of a pre-war grandee who confers distinction by his presence.

Bianchi pursued Mattie Dickinson to Europe and two months later they announced their engagement in Russian as well as in English. They were married on 19 July 1903 in Marienbad (though the announcement had promised a grander venue: the church of the Russian Embassy in Dresden). The bride’s white satin wedding shoes came from Altman’s in New York and her dress was exquisitely (and expensively) fashioned from lace and satin, enveloped in the long white cloud of her veil. All that showed of Mattie herself was a thin, rather tense profile and a puff of dressed brown hair over her forehead, held in place by the frill of her veil.

The couple returned to America. Later in 1903 Mattie was back in Amherst with a foreign husband who, she found, could not banish ‘the heartbreaking associations’ lingering in every corner of The Evergreens.

Nothing more is heard of the pair until early in 1907, when a Miss Charlotte Terry of New York sued Captain Bianchi for $3000. He had borrowed the money on the strength of a Dickinson connection with the Terry family. A cheque returning the sum was ‘dishonoured’, the newspapers reported. The Captain declared no cause for concern: he was importing a car for a millionaire, a company president in Philadelphia, who was to pay $8000 in cash for it. The car, already offloaded, was held by Customs in New York, awaiting $600 import duty. If Miss Terry could lend the Captain that further sum she would have the amount owing to her in ten days, the time it would take to deliver the car to its destination. So confident was the Captain, and so honourable the background of his wife, that Miss Terry actually obliged. The Captain gave her his promissory note, endorsed, as a blank, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and then, before ten days were up, he called on Miss Terry and in her presence drew an initial cheque for $675 on the First National Bank of Amherst. The additional $75 was a small gesture of thanks for Miss Terry’s kindness. He offered this with Old World graciousness. This cheque too was ‘dishonoured’.

In court it came out that the company president had no arrangement with Bianchi to take delivery of a car, and further that no such car had passed through US Customs. Somehow Mattie was persuaded to believe that the money ‘owed us’ was still coming from the reluctant millionaire, and that she and her husband had been ‘victims of a really absurd persecution’. So she told her brother’s old friend, Frothingham. As a respected New York lawyer, he provided her with a ‘character’ and the case went in her favour. In March she protested against what she termed ‘unjust slanders’ and ‘gross misrepresentation’, but by May she was again ‘seriously ill’.

The following year, the Captain’s financial embarrassments compelled him to return to Europe. He went alone, leaving behind his cello, a trunkful