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listened from beyond the door: but the exercise of the imagination proves futile.
    “Surely these rooms would have been darker?”
    “Yes, certainly,” says Debbie. “The wallpaper would have been darker. There would have been heavier drapes on the windows. But there wouldn’t have been much more furniture than we see here.”
    On up the stairs to the landing, where in a glass case, on a headless tailor’s dummy, there hangs a copy of one of Emily’s famous white dresses. The group gathers round it. Alice hangs back. She can only think how frightened Emily would have been, to be trapped in a glass box.
    Some say she took to wearing white to announce herself as a bride, though the bride of whom or what remains obscure. But this is no wedding dress. It’s a practical everyday garment. What else was she to wear? Black? Unthinkable.
Mine—by the right of the white election!
    And through the next door is her bedroom, the room in which she sat at her little maplewood desk, mostly at night, and wrote her poems. The room with the bureau drawer where the poems were found after her death, almost two thousand of them, so many more than anyone had guessed.
    No Emily here either; and yet she was here once. This is the view she looked at, through the front window. Except it isn’t. In her day the land across Main Street was owned by the Dickinsons, it was called the Dickinson Meadow, and hay was harvested there. Emily would have been able to see almost all the way down the meadow to the plot given by Austin to the Todds, where Mabel and David built the house they called the Dell. From the side window of this room Emily would have looked out and seen her brother hastening down the path from the Evergreens to his liaisons with Mabel in the dining room below. What did Emily think of that?
Not seeing, still we know
Not knowing, guess—
Not guessing, smile and hide
And half caress—
And quake and turn away,
Seraphic fear—
Is Eden’s innuendo
“If you dare”?
    The poetry makes Alice shiver. Whatever else she might have been, Emily was on the side of passion.
    The tour makes no mention of Mabel Todd. When it’s over and they’re back in the book-lined shop, Alice raises the matter of the notorious love affair. Debbie pulls a face.
    “We don’t talk about Mabel Todd very much,” she says. “She was something of a troublemaker.”
    “She came here, didn’t she?” says Alice. “For her meetings with Austin?”
    The guide realizes Alice is well-informed.
    “So it seems,” she says, and raises her fine eyebrows.
    “And Emily stood guard outside the door.”
    “It’s a disputed area,” says Debbie. “Have you read Lyndall Gordon’s book?”
    “Yes,” says Alice. “She suggests Emily was an epileptic. I can’t see it myself.”
    “I can tell you’re not signed up to Team Sue.” Sue is Austin’s wife, the woman wronged by Mabel.
    “I’m not sure I’m Team Mabel either,” says Alice.
    She tells Debbie about her planned screenplay. The others from the tour have trickled away.
    “We have to be grateful to Mabel,” says Debbie. “Without her, the poems would never have been published. But you can’t help feeling sorry for Sue. You know what really made her mad? She couldn’t stand the way Mabel demanded the love of two men. It just seemed to her to be unfair, and selfish, and greedy. But I guess that’s not how you’re going to show her in your movie.”
    “I don’t know yet,” says Alice. It’s gratifying the way Debbie takes it for granted that her work, still little more than a few ideas for scenes, will turn into an actual film. “I’m here to do the research.”
    “Where are you staying?”
    “At the Amherst Inn, over the road.”
    Her phone pings. It’s a text from Nick Crocker.
    New idea. Why don’t you stay in our guest suite?
    Alice feels herself going pink.
    “There’s a coincidence,” she says. “I’ve just had the offer of a guest room in someone’s house.”
    “Which house?”