Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [64]
Relations between the two brothers-in-law were less amicable. They were such different characters that, when things were going badly, it was almost inevitable that Thomas’s lugubrious pessimism would irritate easygoing John, while John’s consistently bad judgment about business matters would exasperate Thomas. Thomas was annoyed when the Moodies borrowed, and broke, the Traills’ sugar kettle (although they had it mended for him). For some time, there was a distinct chill between the two men. This pained their wives, who knew their kinship was too valuable to disrupt with petty squabbles. Eventually, Thomas apologized to his brother-in-law: “I again express my sincere and bitter regret at ever having given you any uneasiness, the more particularly at a time when you had more than enough to annoy you otherwise. I hope we shall hence forward live as friends and brothers.”
As the decade drew on and harvests failed, in damp little log cabins scattered through the bush, settlers were starving. Those from genteel backgrounds, like the Moodies and Traills, were the most vulnerable: unlike working-class immigrants, they didn’t have the manual skills to farm for themselves, and they no longer had any money to pay others to work in the fields. Despair drove many to drink. News of the most hopeless cases travelled quickly from settlement to settlement.
Susanna heard about one half-pay officer in nearby Dummer Township, an epauletted and decorated veteran of military service in India, who was so depressed by the dreary cycle of isolation, poverty and crop failures that “the fatal whiskey-bottle became his refuge from gloomy thoughts.” Captain Frederick Lloyd finally deserted his wife Ella altogether and headed south. Susanna organized an expedition to take bread, gingerbread, sugar, tea and home-cured ham to the abandoned wife and her seven children. Since John was away, she asked Thomas, her brother-in-law, to accompany them. Thomas, Susanna and her friend Emilia Shairp, whose cabin was close to the Moodies’, walked for miles in the bitter January cold through the “tangled maze of closely-interwoven cedars, fallen trees and loose-scattered masses of rock.” When they finally arrived at their destination, Susanna saw a picture of utter desolation—a woman struggling to maintain her dignity while watching her children shiver and weep with hunger. They had exhausted their supply of potatoes, which was all they had eaten for weeks. Susanna stared at the wan, emaciated figure in a thin muslin gown (“the most inappropriate garment for the rigours of the season, but … the only decent one that she retained”). She looked at two little boys cowering under the coverings of a crudely made bed in the corner “to conceal their wants from the eyes of the stranger.” She stuttered out a formal greeting: “I hoped that, as I was the wife of an officer, and, like her, a resident in the bush, and well-acquainted with its trials and privations, she would look upon me as a friend.” The little family fell on the sackload of supplies with gratitude. As Susanna watched, she must have wondered whether this was what the future held for her.
Chapter 9
A Call to Arms
I n early December 1837, Sam Strickland was too intent on keeping the heavy iron plough steady to notice the young lad racing over the hill towards him, waving a piece of paper. As dusk settled on the grey landscape, snowflakes began to swirl around the horns of the lumbering oxen. Sam urged Buck and Bright forward. He was late planting, and he knew that once he had finished his own field, he would have to help at his sister Susanna’s farm. John Moodie had broken his foot while sowing his winter wheat and was limping around on homemade crutches.
The excited cries of James Caddy, his neighbour’s son, finally caught Sam’s attention, and he grabbed the paper from the panting youth. It was a proclamation dated December