Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [72]
In Peterborough, Catharine found someone to help fill the gap that Susanna had left in her life. She was able to resume her close friendship with Frances Stewart, the resourceful Anglo-Irish settler whom she’d met when she’d first arrived in Peterborough, and with whom she had kept up a lively correspondence about books and botany. But Catharine didn’t like to reveal to outsiders the truth of her husband’s lengthy depressions, which Susanna had seen first-hand. Catharine still loved Thomas for the gentle, graceful man he was in good times, but she yearned to have a family member close by to whom she might unburden her soul. “I seem to need some one to speak to and interchange friendly thoughts with from time to time,” she acknowledged.
The parting was much worse for Susanna, who would have to watch a stranger move into the log cabin where she had so often gone for comfort. After the Traills had piled all their possessions onto a hired sled, she wrote a poignant note to John: “The dear Traills are gone—I am doubly lonely now. Many tears have I shed for their removal, we have been on such happy terms all winter.” She had always enjoyed talking about books with Thomas, and had come to rely on his chivalry; he had been much more solicitous in hard times than Sam, her brusque brother. Whenever he’d been going into Peterborough, Thomas had checked whether Susanna needed anything. When he left Lake Katchewanooka, he brought her the stove out of the Traills’ cabin. The family “have been so kind to me, especially poor Traill. One knows not the value of a friend till one is left alone in this weary world. The poor children quite fret after their good Aunt.” But it was Susanna who longed most intensely for Catharine’s presence. Without her sister, Susanna “felt more solitary than ever” in “the green prison of the woods.”
Each month seemed to bring a new crisis. In March, the sheriff ’s officer turned up to seize the Moodies’ cattle, in payment of a debt that John had contracted years earlier in Cobourg. Susanna was both flustered and outraged. She first tried to dismiss the officer with all the hauteur she could muster by insisting (truthfully) that the debt had been paid. When he wouldn’t budge from her doorstep, she flung a thick shawl round herself, picked up her baby and imperiously ordered the officer to accompany her to the house of her brother. Sam Strickland was a leading citizen in the area whose credit was a great deal better than his brother-in-law’s, and the officer didn’t want to offend him. So when Susanna, her spine stiff and her face flushed with rage, strode off through the woods, the officer meekly followed her across the Traill property to the Strickland farmhouse, two miles away. Luckily, Sam was home, and he agreed to guarantee the debt if the sheriff would back off for two weeks while payment was confirmed. “I hope you will lose no time in setting the affair to rights and write me as soon as possible to alleviate my anxiety,” Susanna wrote John. She was constantly being dunned by creditors. “Oh heaven keep me from being left in these miserable circumstances another year. Such another winter as the last will pile the turf over my head.”
In Belleville, John was wracked with guilt over the miseries of “my poor old widow in the bush.” He wrote: “I am grieved My Dearest to hear of your sufferings, and God knows how anxious I am that it might be in my power to relieve you from your comfortless situation.” In painstaking detail, he described his efforts to do a bang-up job on the regimental accounts, in the hopes of getting a permanent position. He continued to hope that the steamboat stock might finally increase in value, so he could get some cash for his shares. And he tried to cheer Susanna with optimistic schemes for their future.