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By Root 733 0

was spent largely in that house’. Miss Vinnie’s coils of dark hair were streaked with grey. She was dressed as usual in black cashmere with knife pleats. Millicent saw Miss Emily ‘every day’ but not so far as to notice. The child’s eyes were on her radiant Mamma, who was leaving her. For Mr Dickinson, as always, awaited Mamma in the dining room. There the shades were drawn so that Millicent could hardly make out the colour of the dark-blue china on the sideboard. Looming out of the dimness was the rigid, forbidding shape of Mr Dickinson. Then the door shut, leaving Millicent with Miss Vinnie and fat Maggie billowing about the apple-green kitchen. Holding up a candle, Miss Vinnie descended into the cellar. Her knotty fingers offered the child an apple. Miss Vinnie could not abide the sound of crunching so told the child to move off. This child was a ghost of a being, effaced yet gathering force to save Mamma from a miasma of disapproval infecting half the town.

Mr Dickinson’s daughter - ‘Mattie D’, as townsfolk called her - was most to be feared: tall and spare like her father, her hatred stung the child with a venom that coursed through her veins. To encounter any of them was a shock. ‘That they could be human beings, made of flesh and blood, never occurred to me,’ Millicent recalled later. ‘They were a race apart.’

Millicent spent long periods with Mrs Loomis, who was the daughter of a minister. Mary Loomis had failed to repress her daughter and was resolved to do better with her only grandchild. A photo of 1885 shows a grave, clean child on a footstool in Washington. On one side sits her bony, thin-lipped great-grandmother, the widow of Concord’s minister; on the other side looms her blooming mother with a smile sliding up one cheek. Grandma, folding her hands in her lap, helpless over Mabel’s shame, is determined to impress virtue on the soft, malleable substance of little Millicent, a more biddable character who seems entirely hers.

Grandpa, whom Millicent loved better than anyone, feared she cared too deeply. She preferred his ‘dear quaking voice’ to her mother’s crystal trills. It lulled her to peace. O hush thee my baby. She’d clamber into bed between her grandparents and listen to Grandpa’s stories. As a boy of ten he had a lamb. ‘I raised it,’ he said, ‘and when I sold it, I had a dollar to spend. I walked seventeen miles to a bookstore, and found Shakespeare for a dollar and a half. “Sir,” I said to the bookseller, “would you rather have the book or a dollar?”’ Grandpa still read that book, puffing his pipe and learning speeches by heart. Often he walked up and down reciting.

At ten, Millicent came upon a small object in her mother’s top drawer. It was a pot of rouge. It was not done to use rouge in Amherst, and confirmed the coquette in her mother. At the same time Millicent’s loyalty to Mamma forbade anyone to say anything against her. She disliked Grandma for trying to explain Mamma’s ‘marriage within a marriage’.

Honour thy father and thy mother. Millicent prayed to love Mamma more dearly than she did. ‘Make Mamma a more X woman’, was how she put it. She had no word for X, only her ‘inmost sense that something was utterly wrong’. The more watchful she was, the more determined she had to be not to know what in some way she did know. She was a neat, systematic child. Her thoughts, wishes, her very prayers were pigeonholed, each ‘primly placed’.

At an extraordinarily early age, two or three, Millicent had the ear and voice to sing the upper part of a Bach fugue, yet she rarely sang above a whisper. She developed an aversion to her mother’s music lessons: she wanted to kick and scream, though never did. When Mamma tossed off difficult runs on the piano or delivered her talks, Millicent silently shunned the applause.

Until Millicent could be of use to her mother she hung about in the wings, her eyes fixed on Mamma spinning her graceful scripts, gesturing and trilling in the spotlight. Millicent herself felt unlovely from the age of fourteen, when her father pointed out her square jaw at the same time as she