Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [71]
The Traills did as much as they could for Susanna during these difficult months. But they had their own problems. Catharine had just had her fourth child, a second daughter she named Annie, who was a sickly baby. Thomas was nearly at the end of his tether, because he had been unable to follow John Moodie’s lead and secure a an officer’s commision in the Peterborough regiment. His creditors were pressing him for payment, and he was desperate to sell his farm. But land values had collapsed after the Rebellion. Susanna told John that she thought poor Thomas had “been treated very ill. I hope poor things they will get something soon.” The previous December, trying to help her brother-in-law in the same way that, she presumed, she had helped her own husband, she had written to Sir George Arthur, explaining that her sister’s circumstances “so nearly resemble my own that we may truly be called sisters in misfortune.” She reminded the Lieutenant-Governor that Catharine had done the colony a great service by encouraging immigrants with her “cheerful volume,” The Backwoods of Canada. “The work, which has brought great emolument to the publishers, has done little towards administering to the wants of the poor Author, who is struggling in the Backwoods with four infant children and contending with difficulties which would scarcely be credited by Your Excellency.” But still no appointments or commissions came Thomas’s way.
Perhaps Thomas Traill wasn’t offered a job because the threat of war had passed. Perhaps his age and his reputation as a thinker, rather than a doer, worked against him. Perhaps knowledge of his incapacitating depressions was now widespread. Susanna reported to John that her brother-in-law was “in wretched spirits.” As Catharine, almost single-handedly, kept the household going, she looked around desperately for a way out. She knew her husband could not take another year in the backwoods: they must move into a town, where he could mix with other educated gentlemen and perhaps secure a government job. When a newly arrived Anglican priest, the Reverend Henry Hulbert Wolseley, put in an offer of four hundred pounds for the Traill property, she urged Thomas to accept, it although it was small return for all the money they had invested. In March 1839, Thomas accepted the offer and finally escaped from the bush, and the family moved into Ashburnham, a village across the Otonabee River from Peterborough. But they still had no source of income other than Thomas’s military pension of about one hundred pounds a year, and Thomas’s petitions for an administrative appointment in the district also fell on deaf ears. Only the intercession of George Boulton, the wealthy Cobourg lawyer, prevented the bank from foreclosing on Thomas’s debts, which the four hundred pounds from the farm sale had scarcely dented.
The Traills’ move was a major wrench for both Susanna and Catharine. After five years, the mile-long path that linked their two homes in the forest had become so well-trodden that the roots of the pine trees along its margins stuck out of the ground, tripping up unwary travellers. Living as neighbours, each sister took for granted the availability of the other for casual chats and visits. “The insects were very troublesome coming through the wood from my sister Moodie’s,” noted Catharine in her journal in July 1836. A few days later she wrote, “Went up to my sister’s in the canoe. My sister gave me a nice [cranberry] pie.” Their children ran in and out of each other’s homes, and knew their cousins as well as they knew their own siblings. Whenever a letter arrived from Reydon Hall, telling of Agnes’s publications, their mother’s health or events in Southwold, the sisters would read it together over a cup of tea.
Eleven miles now separated the sisters. Weeks or often months would stretch between encounters. Indeed, for