Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [159]
Agnes Moodie Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, a respected figure in Ottawa during the 1880s, had her mother’s spirit and intelligence.
This was the Ottawa to which Catharine, a cheerful octogenarian with lively blue eyes, came to visit her favourite niece and co-author, Agnes Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, in January 1884. She boarded the smoky carriage of the Grand Trunk Railway at Brockville, where she had been staying with friends, then changed at Prescott onto the Ottawa & Prescott Railway line. During her three hours of jolting train travel, a familiar dread of station crowds at the other end began to suffuse her. She worried that she would never manage to clamber down unaided from the train with all her baggage. She stared anxiously out the window, noting snowbanks so high that the farmhouses and Dutch barns were almost buried. But thirty miles from the capital, a cheery voice called out, “Oh Auntie! I am so glad you are here!” It was Agnes’s eldest daughter, thirty-three-year-old Maime Fitzgibbon, who years earlier had helped colour the lithographs for The Wild Flowers of Canada, and had now joined the train to ensure her greataunt’s comfort. “All the weary feeling and the anxious thoughts fled like melted snow away,” Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop.
Maime, or Mary Agnes as she had been christened, was a particular favourite of Catharine’s because she herself was now an author. In 1880, she had published a lively account of a trip she took by rail, steamer and road to Manitoba, where she spent some months as governess to the children of a CPR engineer. Maime was no fool: she had capitalized on her famous grandmother, Susanna Moodie, by calling her book A Trip to Manitoba, or Roughing it on the Line, and in an attempt to snare a valuable patron she had dedicated it to Lady Dufferin. Maime chatted away to her great-aunt as the train chuffed north. “You will I am sure like your great niece Miss Fitzgibbon,” Catharine wrote to Sarah Gwyllim, who had invited Maime to spend some time in England with her, “She is clever, practical and very agreeable—not pretty, but nice and lady-like and possesses much general knowledge and taste and the talent for writing which still belongs as a source of heirloom to the Strickland race.”
When the train drew into Ottawa’s fussy little station, cab drivers looking for fares and boys eager to earn a few cents carrying baggage swarmed onto the platform. “I should have been perfectly bewildered by the jostling crowd of men and horses and boys pulling at one’s sleeve,” Catharine recorded. But capable Maime elbowed a path through the throng, helped Catharine into a cab, bundled her up against the piercing east wind that cut through the town and told the surly Irish cab driver to take them to New Edinburgh, a small village about a mile east of the Parliament Buildings. The cab bumped along the unploughed road and over the two rickety wooden bridges that spanned the frozen Rideau River. Soon Catharine was settled in front of a warm fire at 52 Alexander Street, the Chamberlins’ pleasant brick house, barely two hundred yards from the Governor-General’s gates at Rideau Hall.
Within a few days of Catharine’s arrival, she was swept up into the social life of the capital by “the good kind [Colonel] and my dear Agnes C.” Agnes introduced her aunt to a social ritual that had not reached Lakefield: weekly “At Homes,” at which ladies received friends and acquaintances. “On Monday Mrs. C took me to call with her on Mrs. Macpherson,” Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop, “and it was her day … ” Catharine, who had never had much time for social rituals, was both impressed and uncomfortable.