Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [153]
Susanna was stuck. She didn’t like her Belleville lodgings, but she could not return to Robert’s cramped household. Sensing her sister’s unhappiness, Catharine continued to press her to come and live in Lakefield. Susanna did not really want to be her sister’s guest—she valued her independence, and she knew that Westove had become a refuge for lame ducks. Every fatherless child, ailing friend and grumpy adolescent within the extended Strickland network knew that Aunt Traill’s door was always open to them. But there were few alternatives for Aunt Moodie. So in the spring of 1872, Susanna accepted her sister’s invitation and boarded the train to Peterborough.
Catharine always loved family reunions. She and her daughter Kate put a stove, a carpet and a cherrywood dresser in the unused bedroom on the second floor for Susanna, and Catharine wrote in delight that “my dear sister Moodie” was going to be “an inmate with us.” At first, Susanna was profoundly relieved to have found such a pleasant home. “Nothing could exceed the kindness of my dear sister and her good daughter,” she told her daughter Katie Vickers. “We live twice as well as I did at Mrs. D.’s, without the miserable and begrudged scarcity and eternal liver and fish dinners. If I feel hungry I can get a bit of bread and butter without having to keep a store of food in private.” As summer approached, she sat in Catharine’s garden, “in a dreamy sort of rapture communing with nature and my own soul,” smelling the lilac and honeysuckle that her sister had planted and watching “the bright winged birds and butterflies disport themselves.” Catharine’s carefully nurtured collection bed of twenty-five different kinds of fern did not interest Susanna, but the summer riot of roses and delphiniums brought back pleasant memories of Suffolk. Often, she would take Catharine’s four-year-old granddaughter Katie Traill down to the water’s edge to watch the perch and sunfish darting through the shadows just below the surface.
The arrangement appeared to suit everybody. From England, Sarah Strickland Gwillym wrote to Susanna to express the satisfaction felt by all four English sisters, now well into their seventies and in varying degrees of health: “I cannot say how glad I am that you have arranged to live with dear Kate. I think it will be a mutual comfort to you both.” Agnes and Sarah probably hoped that if their Canadian sisters shared living expenses, they would need fewer handouts from home.
However, the English sisters might have guessed that Susanna and Catharine would not be happy under one roof for long. They themselves had refused to contemplate living with each other. To Agnes’s chagrin, she had been unable to bully Sarah into allowing her to move into Sarah’s comfortable home in the Lake District. Agnes, in turn, had refused to allow Jane to share her elegant Georgian house in Southwold, purchased after their mother’s death and the sale of Reydon Hall. Jane had had to content herself with buying a humble cottage next door to Agnes. Elizabeth wouldn’t live with anybody: she preferred a reclusive life in her own house, Abbott’s Lodge, in Tilford, Surrey. The only relative she visited was her brother Tom, now retired from the merchant navy. Given this pattern of scratchy relationships, it is no surprise to discover that harmony did not prevail for long at Westove, either.
Susanna and Catharine were too different, and by now too set in their ways, to live together. If anyone was sick, Catharine would start boiling roots and herbs, according to old Indian recipes. Some of her remedies sound terrifying: the limewater gargle that she recommended for a sore throat consisted of diluted quicklime. Susanna, on the other hand, would insist on producing Brown’s Bronchial Troches or Ayre’s Liver Pills—nostrums that were all the rage in the late nineteenth century but were rarely effective. When Catharine’s daughter Annie Atwood arrived with an unruly swarm of children, Susanna would get snappy. (“You must just turn a deaf ear to criticisms