Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [128]
The Traills watched the blaze from beyond the snake fence round the property, where they were out of reach of the searing heat. But as the flames finally subsided, the family made a pathetic sight. They stood amidst the stubble as the sun rose and illuminated the smouldering wreck of their home with the cool light of dawn. Relief that they had all survived evaporated when they realized what they had lost. Thomas’s maps and prints, and all save a handful of his books, were gone; the first-edition novels of Sir Walter Scott that he had so carefully transported from home to home were now just a pile of ash. All the beds, chests and stools were charred fragments, and the cooking pots and pans were bent and blackened. Catharine had lost everything she had carefully preserved for winter: dried apples, herbs, bottled vegetables and fruit, maple sugar and syrup, wild rice, bags of flour. Most of their clothing was gone, as were their candlesticks, plates, cutlery, rag rugs and Catharine’s carefully worked quilts. The Traills had lost all records of their family history: letters from England and Scotland, drafts of Catharine’s published books, all the treasures—antlers, pressed flowers, fossils, squirrel skins, awkward drawings—that recorded the children’s upbringing in the bush. The only batch of papers that Catharine had manage to rescue were her botanical notes on ferns, flowers, trees and shrubs.
The Traills were left worse off than when they had first arrived in the colony twenty-five years earlier: they were now both homeless and penniless. Friends and relatives came to their aid. Sam Strickland gave them ten pounds to replace household goods, and a cheque for twenty pounds arrived from Agnes for “My poor unlucky Catharine.” For a few weeks, the whole family stayed at Thorndale, a nearby farmhouse in which Clinton Atwood, the young man from Gloucestershire, was now living. Catharine looked around for a new house. “I am very desirous to procure a home before the cold sets in as I cannot feel settled here,” she told Ellen Dunlop. But Catharine had no money with which to rent a decent property, and the Traills were forced to scatter around the region, dependent on the kindness of others. Thomas and Catharine went to stay with Sam Strickland at Lakefield. Kate, now twenty-one, and nineteen-year-old Annie, the two eldest daughters, were taken in by friends at Gore’s Landing. Mary Traill, a sixteen-year-old with fragile health, was invited to stay with Ellen Dunlop. Catharine’s eldest son, James, was now married: he and his wife Amelia took in thirteen-year-old William and nine-year-old Walter. Twenty-year-old Harry stayed on with Clinton Atwood.
For Catharine, the fire was simply another crisis that God would help them overcome. “We trusted in Him and were helped.” She began to plan how they might restart their lives. “If we let our farm [land],” she wrote to Ellen, “we can live at a small expence and earn something in a quiet way by needle-work and knitting, pressing flowers and other matters.” She discussed with her sister Susanna the idea of taking in a couple of boarders. But for Thomas Traill, the fire was the last straw. He tried to play his part in getting the family ship afloat again, appealing for help from his first wife’s brother, in the Orkneys: “We were poor enough before but the fire has made us of course still poorer.” As the winter of 1857–58 dragged on, however, he emerged less and less frequently from his bedroom. By now, both the sons he had left behind in Scotland had died. Thomas’s health deteriorated; his cough became more and more pronounced. The following summer, Catharine moved her ailing husband to a cottage in the grounds of Frances Stewart’s house, Auburn, on the outskirts of Peterborough. She nursed him devotedly, but Thomas had lost the will to live. He died on June 21, 1859.
Catharine had always loved her sweet, bewildered husband. She believed that it was her duty “as a wife, and now as