A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [83]
A few years later, once the settlers started to arrive, several inns were established by the Canada Company at various points along the road—inns whose fortunes would suffer dramatically when, some years later, another company of entrepreneurs established a railway from the centre of the province to the port on the lake. The innkeepers, or their offspring, managed, somehow, to keep the doors of their solid brick Georgian buildings open for a year or two afterwards—though it was clear that their trade had suffered and there was no telling how long their businesses would survive.
Branwell’s letter was from such an innkeeper, a certain Mister Sebastien Fryfogel Esquire, proprietor of Fryfogel’s Tavern, which was situated on the Huron Road between the town of Berlin and the hamlet of Stratford. He had heard about the colourful murals of the Ballagh Oisin from a traveller who had stayed there, and he felt that paintings of this nature might enhance the rooms of his inn. Would Branwell consider making the voyage to the west? Fryfogel allowed that he normally had no time for the thieves and rogues that roamed the roads of Upper Canada plying their various trades. He listed tinkers, medicine sellers, horse traders, dancers and singers, and itinerant painters as being among the most disreputable and offensive members of that already defective species of the animal kingdom known as human beings. But he had it on the best authority that Mister Branwell Woodman was, like himself, primarily an honest innkeeper, though one who occasionally painted pristine landscapes with no people—and, in particular, no shapely, sinful women in them. His own inn needed dressing up. Would Branwell oblige?
The letter arrived in early January when funds from the summer had all but dried up and the commissions from mainland locals had slowed to a trickle. Branwell hated the idea of the journey: he had heard the rumours (broken axles, mud, and malaria in summer, overturned sleighs, ghastly blizzards, frostbite, and pneumonia in winter) that circulated about this distant road, and he had no wish to test the accuracy of such rumours. But Marie, who wanted not only to feed her small family but to experiment as well with expensive French dishes in anticipation of hungry and appreciative summer patrons, insisted that he take the commission. “Not much money in it, I’ll wager,” he said, pushing the letter across the table so that Marie could read it.
“More money than we’ve got here,” she replied but in a philosophic tone, with neither judgment nor malice in her voice.
“More money than we have got here,” echoed young Maurice, who was home for Christmas vacation. There was a touch of malice in his voice.
And so, clothed in fur and rugs, Branwell rode in the back of a sleigh bound for the mainland town of Belleville, where he would board the train headed for Toronto, where he would make yet another westbound connection. Mister Fryfogel had written a second letter to say that if Mister Woodman intended to use such an unholy method of transportation as the railroad, it was no business of his and added that he himself, having been almost ruined by the railroad, was only too aware of the double meaning of that phrase. Baden was the name of the stop, he wrote, “a most unpleasant village, born recently as a result of the cursed railroad.” He assured Branwell that he would be able to hire a sleigh at the station and, if conditions were favourable, he would be at the tavern in less than an hour. Sometimes, the innkeeper wrote, there were storms, storms that could make the going a little rough.
When he alighted at Baden, it became clear to Branwell that conditions were considerably less than favourable. Not a sleigh in sight and there was a biting wind, with a velocity higher than any of the ferocious currents he had recorded in his Timber Island journal, which tore at his coat and tossed the beaver hat from his