Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [69]
The Lieutenant-Governor never directly acknowledged Susanna’s letter. As the days shortened and the temperature dropped, Susanna’s spirits fell. But in late October, good news arrived: John Moodie received a letter from Toronto appointing him temporary paymaster to the militia regiments stationed along Lake Ontario and in the Bay of Quinte. The salary of 325 pounds a year was more than Susanna had dared hope for. By December, John was living in Belleville, a well-established lakefront community between Kingston and Cobourg, a journey of ninety-five miles from his family. Susanna was facing her second winter alone in the bush.
Susanna did not relish another separation from John, but they had agreed that she should stay in the backwoods because it was uncertain how long the paymaster job would last. Both assumed Susanna would manage fine: the children were healthy, the Traills were nearby, and Susanna had proved the previous winter that she could handle the farm by herself. Susanna and her children spent Christmas with the Traills, and Catharine produced a delicious roast goose, fattened on wild rice, and plum pudding. The children spent the afternoon sliding down a snowbank. “It was a Christmas treat to watch those joyous faces, buoyant with mirth, and brightened by the keen air, through the frosty panes,” Catharine would recall sixteen years later. As they had done the previous Christmas, the two sisters indulged in a few tears as they recalled memories of “home, country and friends from whom we were for ever parted,” but Catharine reassured Susanna that their sisters in England would be thinking of them and “some kind voice would murmur, ‘Ah would they were here.’” At the end of the celebration, Catharine helped Susanna pile her five youngsters into the horsedrawn sleigh for the journey home; the children immediately fell asleep “and we were left in silence to enjoy the peculiar beauties of that snow clad scene by the dreamy light that stole down upon our narrow road through the snow laden branches above our heads.”
Susanna was still nursing little Johnnie. Her left breast had begun to ache on Christmas Day: within forty-eight hours it was inflamed and throbbing. “I was in great agony, and did little else but cry and groan until the following Sunday,” Susanna later wrote to John. “Kind Traill went himself after dark and brought up the Dr. at three o’clock in the bitter cold morning. He put the lancet immediately into my breast, and I was able to turn and move my left arm for the first time for ten days, for I lay like a crushed snake on my back unable to move or even to be raised forward without the most piteous cries. You may imagine what I suffered when I tell you that more than half a pint of matter must have followed the cut of the lancet, and the wound has continued to discharge ever since. I was often quite out of my senses, and only recovered to weep over the probability that I might never see my beloved husband again.” Dr. Hutchison, a gruff Scottish practitioner from Peterborough, was shocked to see a wellborn Englishwoman sick and alone except for her small children and an illiterate Irish servant. He looked round the forlorn, cold, dirty room, feebly lighted by the wretched lamp, and said to Susanna: “In the name of God! Mrs. Moodie get out of this.”
As Dr. Hutchison had pointed out, the log cabin that Susanna had once regarded as “a palace” was showing its age. Wood smoke had blackened the interior and left a sooty residue on every surface. The log walls had shrunk