Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [24]
Catharine returned to Reydon Hall, and every afternoon, often with Jane or Agnes, strolled along to Southwold where the Moodies were installed in a cottage overlooking the grey North Sea. The newlyweds were the perfect advertisement for marriage: John played his flute and made his sisters-in-law laugh, while Susanna beamed with unaccustomed happiness. And Catharine was not the only visitor to the clifftop cottage: soon after the Moodies moved to Southwold, Thomas Traill, an old friend of John’s, came to stay with them. Like John, Thomas was a Presbyterian Scot and a half-pay officer who came from the impoverished Orkney gentry. Both had served in the Royal (Northern) Fusiliers during the final years of the Napoleonic wars. The Traill family estate, Westove, near the little town of Kirkwall, was as run-down and mortgaged as the Moodie estate had been. Westove had once been a seat annual income of 18,000 to 30,000 pounds (equivalent to at least a million pounds today) from its harvest of sea-kelp, which was used in the manufacture of glass. But when straw, a far cheaper alternative, was discovered to be equally effective as a chemical reagent and source of potash, Traill fortunes plummeted. Unfortunately, the Traills went on living like lords for some years, saddling the estate with a pile of hopeless debts. Now Thomas could expect no dividends from Westove’s farms or its sea-kelp harvest.
Thomas Traill had served in the Napoleonic wars with John Moodie: in 1832, he was a balding widower of uncertain means.
John and Thomas were complete opposites in looks and personality. Where John Moodie was short, bearded and plump, Thomas Traill was tall, thin, balding and clean-shaven. While John was jovial and energetic, Thomas was reserved and sedentary. John enjoyed a convivial pipe of tobacco surrounded by friends; Thomas silently took snuff. John always had a smile on his face; a gloomy expression characterized Thomas. While John Moodie liked to see himself as a man of action, Thomas Traill saw himself as a scholar—he had attended Wadham College, Oxford, spoke several languages and adored highbrow chat with fellow intellectuals. One of his closest friends was John Lockhart, son-in-law and biographer of Britain’s hugely successful novelist Sir Walter Scott. And while John Moodie had presented himself to Susanna free of family responsibilities, Thomas Traill arrived on the scene in 1831 as a thirty-eight-year-old newly widowed father of two teenage boys. He had left his sons, Walter and John, with a relative in Scotland and moved to London, like his fellow officer John Dunbar Moodie, to find some congenial company and, perhaps, a wife.
As the winter winds whistled across Southwold beach, and Susanna Moodie awaited the arrival of her baby, it didn’t take long for Thomas and Catharine to become close. Both were lonely and recovering from the abrupt end of cherished relationships. Both were great readers. Catharine’s serenity and optimism were irresistible to Thomas, who himself admitted of his own temperament, “I am not disposed to be sanguine about anything.” He recognized that her kindness and unshakable faith offered him a sense of security that he had never been able to achieve for himself. And Catharine found in Thomas what she had feared she would lose in Susanna’s departure—a close friend who offered companionship, and who needed her.
The atmosphere