Darling Emily is about a woman who adores Emily Dickinson, writes poetry and is convinced that she will be totally destroyed by a handsome stranger. She is right. Lemme know what you think of the first chapter...
1. Leticia and Emily
Leticia Walker Reed was considerably more attractive than she thought she was. She had trouble making friends, getting along in society, with self-esteem and, in a later age, would probably be diagnosed with some ailment on the higher functioning end of the autism spectrum. In short Leticia Walker Reed was odd. Always had been. Intelligent, in fact smarter than most of her tutors, teachers and headmasters. It was odd enough that she had been invited to the University of California and offer still that she was given a full scholarship: her family was one of the richest in eleven western states.
Her oddness was a good thing. Good for her that she was left alone to study. Good that she would find many like-minded individuals at University and good for her that she was a citizen of an entirely different America. The bad part was that women in the early part of the 20th century were rarely allowed to share their intelligence with the world. College was just a four year respite from family matters and a way to meet the well-bred sons of California industrialists. But the fact that she got a first-class education and graduated with distinction was a good secret.
Leticia Walker Reed, Letty to her few friends, kept many secrets. She was well-behaved and knew her place, she kept her council among the people she was smarter than and kept her secrets in a diary that was itself a secret. Letty was an intense correspondent with the poet Emily Dickinson. This was a one-way correspondence as Letticia Walker Rees only recently discovered Dickinson and, as the rest of the world did, only after her death.
As a woman of her time, Letty knew only too well that a woman’s career path could only be as a wife or a teacher. But she wanted intrigue. She loved eavesdropping on her father’s meetings with representatives from Pinkerton’s Detective Agency and longed to become involved in crime, either side of which offered more excitement than Walker’s Mill, California.
Even Darling Emily Dickinson had found intrigue. The toast of the literary world – a published and respected poetess! Even if it was nearly two decades after her death, at least Miss Dickinson’s case was published. Letty had nearly as many poems in her own diary but, after reading Dickinson, had grown in her knowledge of poetry to know that she simply didn’t measure up. Lately the audience to whom she wrote in her diary became the friend she never knew but with whom she had so much in common.
Letty shared many problems with her dear friend Miss Emily Dickinson of Amhurst. She was more intelligent than anyone in her immediate family; no one understood her poetry; she excelled at and enjoyed domestic pursuits like baking, sewing and gardening even though she wanted more out of life; and she believed she was destined to be swept up in an intriguing, devastating relationship with a handsome and dangerous stranger. Of all these fantasies, sadly, only two would come true for Letty. The first and the last.
Leticia’s diary read like a series of open letters, each of which began: ‘My Dear, Dear Emily,’ or sometimes: ‘Darling Emily,’ and, when something particularly vexed the diarist, simply, ‘Emily’. The diary, excruciatingly neat in presentation and correct in grammar, punctuation and spelling, was only exciting when it left the mundane world of Walker’s Mill, California and entered the illusory realm of the thoughts, dreams and, fantasies of the diary’s owner. Modern psychologists, if ever given the chance to read the diary of Leticia Walker Reed, would conclude that she was intensely intelligent, a rigorous grammarian, possessor of an immense vocabulary but sadly, totally and completely delusional bordering on psychotic.
Of course, the twin facts that a): every neatly-written, well-reasoned word was true and b): the diary had been purloined by handsome and dangerous stranger with whom she’d had a brief, intriguing and thoroughly devastating relationship, made Leticia Walker Reed’s disappearance a perfect crime. Perfect in that the handsome stranger, Leticia and her diary were never heard from again. In fact no one even presumed that that the unfortunate circumstance was anything but a disappearance. Poor little rich girl gives it all up for handsome stranger, one that no one ever saw.
Had the Placer County Sheriff been able to investigate, he would have uncovered the most sensational case in the County’s then brief history. The nearly limitless Walker and Reed fortunes made sure that those venerable names were kept out of the newspapers. The family’s more professional and infinitely better funded investigations shed no more light on the case than did the Sheriff’s.
Leticia sat on her bed in the mansion she called Shambala but that the family called Waterwood. She rote in her diary while waiting, impatiently, for her father to return, He was now three weeks late.
My Dear, Darling Emily,
Thank you, thank you, darling for your intense verse! I was kept awake late into the night by the thumping, no, the pounding of your magical, motoric, meter. It was as if the rhythm your verse took over my heart, mind and body and that your poetry commandeered my very soul and imprisoned my soul. It was a forced march through your visions, your words and your invention. I was a most willing captive. Thank you, darling Emily!
Thanks also for hiding your work until it could be appreciated! How dare that charlatan tell you you couldn’t write! How dare that man, impotent, crass and barbaric, destroy your creation – one that he was too simple to understand. Or could he? Was he, dear Emily, simply incapable of expressing his awe, as I have in these very pages, because of his stupid, inane and infinitely worthless masculinity?
How desperately I dare to dream that I can sequester myself, heart, soul, body and mind, from the machinations of men as you have! But I fear, dear Emily, that I mayn’t be as strong as you. Did you love (the guy who told Dickinson she couldn’t write)? Did he destroy you as totally as I fear I will one day be destroyed? I look forward to parts of it with a morbid fascination but mostly with trepidation as, Dear Emily, my cannon is nowhere near complete.
I would innumerate on my shortcomings at length but it seems that Father and Uncle James have arrived from San Francisco and are desirous of engaging me in a job for the trust. Imagine! Two months divorced from University and degree, and already earning my keep. More soon!
The household was in a flutter in anticipation of the arrival of James and Adolphus Reed. The dispatch from the telegraph office in Walker’s Mill had informed Mrs. Reed of her husband’s impending return. Isabella Walker Reed was a formidable woman. For years it was rumored that her father owned one half of California and her husband and his brother owned the other. It was a match made in the real estate office. There was love of a kind but mostly respect between these two California pioneers. Respect for each other, for decorum and, above all, for business.
