Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [147]
The Montreal Daily News wrote: “This beautiful work must be regarded as a most valuable addition to the literature of Canada. It is a joint production of two ladies, Mrs. Agnes Fitzgibbon of Toronto and her aunt, Mrs. Traill of North Douro, a lady well-known to the literary world, sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the celebrated authoress of the Lives of the Queens of England … Between them these ladies have produced a work of great merit; and we rise from its perusal full of hope for the future literary reputation of the Dominion.” The periodical New Century referred to the book as “[o]ne of the most remarkable works ever attempted by a woman.” Agnes Fitzgibbon, who had stayed in Montreal to oversee the first printing, easily found subscribers amongst that cosmopolitan city’s literary set for a second and then a third edition within a few months.
Spurred by success, Catharine and Agnes planned English and American editions, and further botanical collaborations. Catharine must have hoped that this triumph would stimulate interest amongst publishers for her longer manuscript about plants. But all these hopes and plans were quickly overtaken by events. A more attractive proposition than literary sweat and toil came along for pretty, clever Agnes Fitzgibbon: a new suitor. While selling subscriptions for Canadian Wild Flowers in Ottawa, she had been introduced to Colonel Brown Chamberlin. Chamberlin, a lawyer who owned the Montreal Gazette, was active in the militia and was the Conservative member of Parliament for the Eastern Townships riding of Missisquoi. Moreover, the dashing Colonel Chamberlin had served Sir John A. Macdonald, his political boss, so well that a patronage plum came his way: in early 1870, he was appointed Queen’s Printer, which gave him a very comfortable annual salary of $2,000. Within a year of first meeting, Agnes and her suitor were married. Agnes had achieved what every young widow of the era prayed for: a second chance. Moreover, unlike Charles Fitzgibbon, Brown Chamberlin offered the three Rs—he was rich, respectable and reliable. In 1871, thirty-eight-year-old Agnes Chamberlin gave birth to her fourth daughter and (counting the four earlier deaths) ninth child. She no longer had the time or inclination to scrape a living in the book world.
In July 1870, tragedy struck Catharine Parr Traill’s family. Her son Harry had recently got a job as a guard at Kingston Penitentiary. One day, while he was supervising a limekiln within the prison grounds, two convicts attacked and killed him in the course of a planned escape. It was a brutal crime: Harry’s head was split open by a crowbar wielded from behind him. The newspapers covered the trial and conviction of the murderers the following November with ghoulish interest—it was the first time a prison guard had been murdered in the line of duty in Canada.
The loss of her second son devastated Catharine. She told Frances Stewart how she desperately tried to forget “the terrible details of this most disastrous event, and to think only that he is gone from amongst us.” Susanna’s sympathy for her sister was unstinting—although clothed, as usual, with snatches of her own enduring grief. “Oh dear, dear Katie, you have my fullest, deepest sympathy….The poor wife will feel it most, for in the course of Nature, you and I will soon join our dear ones again, but she poor thing has a long sad life of widowhood before her.”
Catharine worried about Harry’s widow, Lily, and three children. She prayed that “God who