Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [44]
The Moodies’ maidservant, Hannah, did not stay long, nor did any of her successors. It was a hard life, and there were plenty of homes crying out for servants that could offer a more comfortable situation. Susanna’s insistence that she was not going to compromise her standards, and that master and servant must eat separately even though they now lived in a one-room cabin rather than Reydon Hall, didn’t help. Without a servant, Susanna was regularly faced with menial tasks that she had never performed at home and now had to master. On her first attempt at laundry, she scrubbed the skin off her wrists without getting the clothes clean. On her first attempt at baking bread, she produced a leaden, burnt lump. “Oh Mrs. Moodie,” Tom Wales snickered. “I hope you make better books than bread.” The days seemed endless as she sat by a crackling fire and tried to ignore the snow falling steadily. Tom Wales left, desperate to return to England even though his pockets were empty and his health broken. Homesickness triggered uncontrollable bouts of tears in the early weeks. On one occasion, when John was away in Cobourg or Peterborough, Susanna faced the terror of being left overnight, alone but for her baby, while wolves howled and her last candle spluttered into darkness: “Cold, heart-weary and faint, I sat and cried.”
After a wretched winter, first in the hut and then in another small cabin nearby, the Moodies finally took possession of their farmhouse the following June. They found it overrun by mice (they trapped fourteen the first night), fleas and large black ants. “Old Joe,” as the Moodies called Joseph Harris, and his brood had left a dead skunk in a cupboard as a farewell gift. But no sooner had the Moodies cleaned up the mess than gullible John made another miscalculation.
Acknowledging his own ignorance of farming methods, John adopted a well-known pioneer strategy and agreed to “share” the farm with another couple. The Moodies would provide the land, implements, livestock and seed, while the other couple would do all the manual work and share the produce. But the couple cheated the Moodies ruthlessly, stealing their potatoes, apples, seed corn and even their rooster and ruining their implements. “All the money we expended on the farm was entirely for these people’s benefit, for by the joint contrivances very little of the crops fell to our share; and when any division was made, it was always when Moodie was absent from home and there was no person present to see fair play,” Susanna wrote. Even more upsetting for Susanna was the wife’s wagging tongue. “We no longer had any privacy,” Susanna complained. “Our servants were cross-questioned, and our family affairs canvassed by these gossiping people, who spread about a thousand falsehoods regarding us. I was so much disgusted with this shareship, that I would gladly have given them all the proceeds of the farm to get rid of them.”
Throughout these trials, Susanna began to get a sense of herself as a woman of fortitude. In England, after their father’s death, the Strickland sisters had realized that they would have to live by their wits. They couldn’t afford to comport themselves in the manner of the helpless creatures they wrote about for the London annuals. And yet each had tried to radiate the delicate femininity common to fashionable ladies. To abandon the appearance of sweet vulnerability would have been to risk social censure.