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By Root 1230 0

zest for life. Short and stocky, with unruly dark hair, John was just too damn cheerful and healthy to fit the languid ideal of the era, but there was an attractive gallantry to him. He had a score of thrilling anecdotes about his military experiences in the Napoleonic wars and his adventures on the South African veldt, where he had settled after he left the army. As Susanna’s mother noted approvingly, he was a “gentleman of family and high moral character.” And the Scotsman, who was six years older than Susanna, played the flute, composed poetry and wrote the most beautiful love letters. “I feel we cannot live but in each other’s arms,” he told his “beloved Susie” within weeks of meeting her. “My whole soul is absorbed in one sweet dream of you—you must and shall be mine …I care for no luxuries, dearest, let me but press you to my heart and I will live upon those dear lips, and these worldly cares would be forgotten …”

His passion was enough to persuade Susanna, her mother and her older sisters to overlook what Mrs. Strickland politely referred to as an “income too confined to support a wife.” The wolf was not far from the door for John Dunbar Moodie. He belonged to a class disastrously familiar to mothers of eligible daughters in early-nineteenth-century England: officers who had defended King and country during the Napoleonic wars and had now been pensioned off on half-pay; at any time, they could be recalled for active service. Britain’s wars with France in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries had been a boon for younger sons of impoverished gentry. Fighting “Boney” had given them an income and a way of life otherwise unavailable.

The youngest of five sons of an ancient but obscure Scottish family, John Moodie was born in 1797 on his family’s estate on the bleak and craggy Isle of Hoy in the Orkneys. Melsetter, the family seat, was a large, ugly brick manor house, built about forty years earlier and already heavily mortgaged. John’s eldest brother, Benjamin, sold it at the first opportunity. John joined the army as soon as he was old enough: at sixteen, he became a second-lieutenant in the 21st Royal (Northern) Fusiliers. But within two years he had been wounded in the left wrist during an engagement on Dutch soil and retired on half-pay, with few prospects and little education. His income would barely cover the needs of a bachelor of modest tastes—and though John wasn’t extravagant, throughout his life he was immoderately generous to those he loved.

In 1817, John’s brother Benjamin Moodie had emigrated to the Cape Colony, at the southern tip of Africa. The British government was offering free passage and a hundred acres of land to anyone who would settle the land and quell the Bantus, or “Kaffirs,” as the settlers contemptuously called them (kaffir means “infidel” in Arabic). So in 1819 John decided to join Ben. The following year, a third brother, Donald, sailed off to the Cape as well. John Dunbar Moodie spent eleven years farming the red soil of southern Africa, and there were aspects of life in the colony that he loved. Rising at dawn and shouldering his rifle, he would ride out across the open grasslands to hunt elephants and “sea-cows,” as the Boers called hippopotamus. But it was a miserable and lonely existence for a sociable man in his twenties: speaking broken Dutch to his Boer neighbours in the Groote Valley, scratching a subsistence living from the dry and stony terrain and repelling Bantu raids on his livestock. “I lived for years without companionship, for my nearest English neighbour was twenty-five miles off….My very ideas became confused and limited, for want of intellectual companions to strike out new lights.” John dreaded the idea that he might turn into another crusty, sunburnt old misanthrope, grumbling to newcomers about the way that West-minster ignored South Africa’s potential. So in 1830, he returned to England, “with the resolution of placing my domestic matters on a more comfortable footing.”

Within weeks of his return, John Moodie had secured Susanna’s heart. Within months,