Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [48]
The journey was a nightmare. The Moodies travelled nearly fifty miles that day, from Cobourg on Lake Ontario, via Port Hope, over the marshy, thickly wooded area then known as the Cavan swamp. They had hoped to stop for the night on the far side of the swamp, in Peterborough, then a sprawl of wooden houses and a few stone buildings including an inn. But the two brothers hired to drive them were eager to keep going and accomplish the whole distance within a day. So from Peterborough, as a blood-red sun dropped below the white horizon, they followed the roaring, surging Otonabee River eleven miles north towards the new settlement on the banks of Lake Katchewanooka.
On and on the sleighs rattled and bumped, over the frozen ridges of the icy track, between high snowbanks. Sometimes the two sleighs slid smoothly over the ground; other times, the Moodies were thrown violently forward as the sleigh runners hit a rock or tree stump protruding through the packed snow. The full moon, which had allowed Susanna to see the road ahead, clouded over. The cold grew more intense. The wind rose.
As the night wore on, Susanna gripped the side of the sleigh and concentrated with grim determination on a single point in the future: their arrival at Lake Katchewanooka. The Moodies were expecting to stay there with Sam. Susanna could remember her brother only as an ebullient, curly-haired teenager, who had left England to make his fortune in the New World in 1826, though she knew from her husband John’s visits to Sam the previous fall that he was now married and comfortably settled. All she could think about was the first sight of his cheerful face, and the moment when she would step out of the cumbersome, hateful sleigh and be embraced by her own flesh and blood. She knew her beloved sister Catharine was in the same area, but she wasn’t sure when she would see her. She was too cold and exhausted by travel to think of anything beyond the prospect of Sam’s hearth. When the sleigh finally drew up outside a solid log house, with lighted windows, she could barely wait to uncurl her cramped, stiff body.
Before she had time to clamber down from the sleigh, however, Sam emerged from his log house. He yelled a hearty greeting but immediately told the driver they were not stopping yet. Blithely oblivious to his sister’s exhaustion, and careless of the misery in her face, he told her that she was expected at her sister’s, a further ten minutes down the road. All Susanna heard was that the journey was not yet over. She buried her face in the fur of her dog and wept.
A further upset lay ahead. When the first heavily laden sleigh was in sight of their destination, the driver pulled the horses up to a slithery, unexpected stop. The road ahead was completely blocked by the massive trunk of a fallen pine tree. The second sleigh nearly cannoned into the back of the first. The first driver urged his horses to jump the obstruction: the sleigh with its human cargo teetered for a minute on the top of the trunk, then slid safely across. When the second sleigh reached the top of the log, however, it hung poised there for a second and then, in ghastly slow motion, tipped gradually onto its side and finally fell to the ground with a dreadful crash. The sleigh landed heavily on the wooden crates it had carried. The frozen darkness was filled with the sounds of wood splitting, glass breaking and china smashing. Iron cooking pots that had been tied to the top of the pile of crates rolled across the road. Fragments of wood, pottery and bone china spilled out into the snow. Not one piece of the precious Coalport tea service survived the calamity.
Susanna Moodie had loved her elegant teapot, with its pattern of gold leaves and blue ribbons and flowers. During the first months in their Hamilton Township cabin,