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John’s decision to give Dunbar the Bridge Street cottage, and Dunbar’s decision to sell it, provoked endless family rows and recriminations. Katie Vickers and her husband, who thought little of Dunbar and his wife, were so exasperated that they stopped talking to the Moodies. This meant that John and Susanna had lost the support of their only child who was comfortably settled. Next, Susanna decided that she and John could not go to Delaware with Dunbar, as they had originally planned; she could not bear to leave Belleville. However, they now had neither a roof over their heads nor any equity. And in the midst of all this confusion, news reached them from Toronto that the feckless Charles Fitzgibbon had died suddenly, leaving Agnes a penniless widow with six young children. Susanna ached to help her poor daughter, but she had no money. Nor could she help Donald Moodie, her second son, who was also in a fix. “His heedless extravagance has been a sore burthen and trial to us,” Susanna complained in a letter to Bentley (although she refrained from admitting that Donald was well on his way to becoming an alcoholic). Only Robert, the sturdy youngest son, continued to express concern for his parents. But since he too was now married, with a delicate wife and young family but no job, he could offer only sympathy. Family turmoil made Susanna sick with anxiety for the future. In her weakened state, she contracted typhoid fever—rampant in every small town due to the primitive wooden drains, but in Susanna’s view, due in her own case to “mental anxiety.”

Thanks to her sturdy Strickland constitution, Susanna recovered from the fever. Bowing to the inevitable, she gave up any thought of living with one of their children. Instead, she and John rented a modest wood-frame cottage a mile outside Belleville and found an elderly servant to look after them. From her front windows overlooking the Bay of Quinte, Susanna could watch schooners unload cargoes of coal on the wharves, then return to Oswego, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, loaded with lumber. Various grandchildren came to stay. Friends brought baskets of apples, onions, beans and carrots, and took Susanna out for a spin in their carriages. Susanna eked out a living by selling paintings of flowers. But her letters are steeped in the anguish of infirmity and fear. Often, her only diversion was to watch the antics of Quiz, her Skye terrier, and Grim, a steel-grey cat. She wrote to her faithful patron, Richard Bentley: “My dear husband is not very well, low-spirited and anxious….My heart has been nearly broken. I often wonder that I am alive.” Neither she nor John enjoyed old age. “Old age is selfish,” she exclaimed to her niece Mary Traill, now married and living in Belleville. “It covets companionship, which the young too much immersed in the pleasures and hopes of their happy prime, have no time or inclination to give, and when your own nestlings are all flown, the lonely hours hang heavily on your hands and the shadows lengthen in the dark valley as you totter slowly and sadly on.”

Death hovered in the shadows, and Susanna shrank from its touch. Her mother had finally passed away in 1864, her ninety-two years belying her constant complaints of ill health. Both her brother Sam and Catharine’s son James Traill died in 1867. Her sister Sarah’s husband, Richard Gwillym, died in 1868 (“Dear Thay … looks sweet in her weeds,” wrote Agnes). Agnes had at last resumed her correspondence with Susanna, but her letters were full of medical grumbles. “Dr. Wilson … said I had a liver complaint of long-standing and my illness in the spring had been wrongly treated by leeching and blue pills,” she moaned.

One brisk October day in 1869, John Moodie sat on the porch of his cottage attempting to split some firewood with his good right hand. Susanna, who was returning from a walk, put her hand on his shoulder as she passed through to the kitchen door. “You naughty creature,” she teased her husband. “Did