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By Root 1209 0

they had lived so close that they continued to regard each other’s family as an extension of their own, and they shared each other’s maternal delights and concerns. The Traill offspring remained a tight-knit group who adored their mother, although the open contempt that James and Harry, now tall young men, showed for their father upset Catharine. Resentful of the endless farm tasks they were expected to do, they were often surly and rude. Catharine appealed to Susanna to tell the boys to curb their “want of respectfulness and deference of manner.” Catharine’s two older daughters, Katie and Annie, had far more compassion for the old man. The Traill household expanded in 1855 when a nineteen-year-old emigrant, Clinton Atwood from Gloucestershire, arrived to board and learn farming. This meant more work for the women: “My dear girls are kept busy from morning till night and I can hardly keep the clothing in order for the four boys and Mr. Traill and now Clinton is added to wash iron and mend for as well,” Catharine complained. But he and Annie were soon “walking out” together. A compulsive matchmaker, Catharine was torn between delight in the romance and apprehension that she might soon lose Annie, a mainstay of the household, who kept an eye on the two youngest boys, William and Walter. Catharine’s youngest daughter, Mary, frequently stayed with her Aunt Moodie for long spells. Catharine fretted that when Mary came home, she would “feel the change from a house of great plenty and every comfort to ours which is not so…. How good my sister has been to my little one.”

Susanna’s house was undoubtedly more comfortable than Catharine’s, but her family was less harmonious. There didn’t seem to be any emotional glue to keep her five children close to home. Susanna’s eldest son, Dunbar, disappeared west to join the California gold rush. Her second son, Donald, a charmer with his father’s joie de vivre whom Susanna adored, was costing his parents one hundred pounds a year (several thousand dollars in today’s currency) because he had persuaded them to send him to the new medical school at McGill University. Rumours were already reaching Belleville that Donald was spending more time in the bars than the lecture halls. He lacked, in Susanna’s eyes, “that energy which alone ensures success.” And Susanna’s dire predictions about Agnes Fitzgibbon’s marriage had been fulfilled: by the time she was twenty-one, Agnes had three children, was expecting her fourth, and was constantly appealing to her parents for help. In 1856, Susanna thanked her publisher Richard Bentley profusely for his latest remittance: “It enabled me to help one very dear to me, in sickness and in sorrow, when I had no other means of doing so.” Her relief was short-lived: Agnes’s fourth baby died (probably of scarlet fever or meningitis) when it was four months old. “We bask for a few days in the warm sunshine of domestic happiness,” reflected Susanna, “and awake one morning to find the shadow of death resting upon our own threshold.” Ill health drove Agnes back to her parents’ roof: she and her three children spent several weeks in Belleville so her mother could nurse her through sickness and depression.

There was further disruption in the Moodie household in 1855 when the Moodies’ eldest daughter, Catherine, married a young businessman who had just moved from Belleville to Toronto. John Joseph Vickers ran his own delivery firm and was soon so successful that he could afford a well-built stone mansion, with separate servants’ quarters, on Adelaide Street. A stolid, reliable man, Vickers was a support to his in-laws from the moment he entered the family. But like Agnes, Catherine Vickers was plagued by health problems: the doctor diagnosed chronic bronchitis. Such a condition, Susanna knew, was often confused with tuberculosis. The diagnosis “made me too anxious to think of any thing else,” she wrote. And with Catherine’s departure from Belleville, Susanna had lost the mainstay of her household. Only Robert remained at home.

There was another topic of conversation that