Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [156]
Catharine slowly clambered up the narrow staircase of the brick duplex to the bedroom overlooking the back garden, where Susanna had spent most of the previous two years. She was shocked when she saw Susanna: “She looked aged and feeble and I found the fine intellect much weakened … more than I could have supposed. Only at times she would brighten up, and seem more like her old self; but it was like flashes of light on dull cloudy days.” Catharine’s ten-day visit proved a tonic for both these sturdy women. Susanna insisted on struggling down the narrow stairs to Robert’s parlour, where her old piano now stood. Then Catharine would sit down and pick out the hymns they had learned in their Suffolk childhood. Susanna insisted that Charles Wesley was “the king of hymn writers,” and the sisters’ quavery sopranos would join together in the words of “Jesu, lover of my soul” or “Forth in thy Name, O Lord, I go.” Many of the poignant verses must have recalled for the sisters their hard times in the backwoods, when they and their young families had assembled on Sundays in Catharine’s parlour to sing the same verses:
Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
Catharine’s visit gave Susanna a new lease on life. For a few months, the shadows of dementia retreated from her mind, and she recovered her appetite for visitors. When a dapper, middle-aged Englishman, with shiny black boots and a jaunty self-assurance, turned up at Robert’s house, she was eager to talk to him. The visitor was James Ewing Ritchie, a well-known English travel writer. Ritchie had been commissioned by the London periodical the Christian World to cross the Atlantic in order to prepare a series of articles on the pros and cons of emigration to Canada. But Susanna knew Ritchie as the son of Andrew Ritchie, once the pastor of Wrentham Congregational Church, three miles north of Reydon. It was Pastor Ritchie who had converted the young and spiritually restless Susanna to Congregationalism in 1830.
James Ritchie had inquired into the whereabouts of Agnes Strickland’s sisters as soon as he arrived in Canada. He knew that their stories, and their link to the famous royal biographer, would make great copy. Before he had even tracked them down, he’d drafted a few dramatic paragraphs about two “delicately nurtured ladies” who had been “familiar with the best of London literary society” and had then arrived in the “waste, howling wilderness” of Canada and slaved as “no servant girl slaves in England.” Now he had finally located Susanna in Toronto, and he reported that she possessed “a mental vigour and active memory rare in one so aged.” They talked for hours about her memories of her Suffolk childhood and of Regency London.
After talking to Susanna, Ritchie knew that both sisters had incredible stories to tell. So he made a special side trip in order to visit Lakefield and knocked on the door of Westove. Catharine, who had fussed over James when he was a little boy, was even more delighted to see him than Susanna had been—it is easy to imagine a smart London journalist flinching from the garrulous flow of reminiscences he had sparked. Ritchie told his readers that he was bowled over by Mrs. Traill’s “queenlike” manners and enthusiasm for nature: “In spite of all the hardships she has had to undergo as wife and mother in the wilderness, her face still retains something of the freshness and fairness of her youth. She is a wonderful old lady.” Ritchie lavished praise on the literary output of both women, and on their role as “pioneers of Canadian literature.” Much of Ritchie’s interview with Susanna was reprinted in