Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [75]
A last wave of nostalgia washed over Susanna as she took a final look back. She saw the log cabin in which she had given birth to her three sons; she gazed at the snake fence she had constructed with her own hands around her garden, and at the lonely lake beyond. She realized that her Chippewa friends had silently materialized in the clearing: with tears running down her cheeks, she kissed the women and their babies in an affectionate farewell. Daylight was nearly gone, and Sam had no time for his sister’s sentimentality. He hurried her onto the seat next to him, shot a quick glance backwards to make sure children, baskets and bags were safely stowed and gave a loud “Giddyup” to the horses.
Susanna was mute as the sleigh slid through the incredible pall of the winter landscape. Tears ran silently down her face as she listened to the jangle of the horses’ bridles, the rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk of their hooves, the slither of runners on hard-packed snow, the rustle of dried leaves still clinging to the trees. Cold air entered the travellers’ nostrils like knives; the horses’ heads were soon white with frost. The party spent that night in Peterborough, where Susanna was able to arrange for the return of little Aggie to her own family after close to a year with Mary Hague.
In town, Susanna had a jarring insight into her children’s ignorance of any life beyond their hardscrabble solitude in a backwoods cabin. As the loaded wagon entered the main street, five-year-old Dunbar stared in amazement at buildings that nestled up against each other. “Are the houses come to see one another?” he asked. “How did they all meet here?”
Chapter 10
Belligerent Belleville
B y the admittedly modest standards of Upper Canada in 1840, Belleville was close to the acme of sophistication, with far more class and culture than Cobourg or Peterborough. It was large (the most important settlement between Kingston and Toronto) and well established (its Loyalist founders could trace their history in Upper Canada back three generations). It had been named after Lady Bella Gore, the beautiful young wife of Governor Francis Gore, in 1816, and its ladies prided themselves that their fashionable attire was less than a year behind London’s.
In 1840, Belleville was one of the most important towns in Upper Canada, with a good harbour and a growing population.
Belleville’s economy was thriving, thanks to two flour mills, two carding mills, four sawmills, three breweries, seven blacksmiths’ shops and two tanneries. At its wharves, sailboats bringing goods from northern New York State via the Bay of Quinte jostled with fishing boats and steamers carrying passengers along the lakefront. Its twenty-six shops and twelve grocery stores carried imported goods from the United States, the West Indies and Europe, as well as locally grown produce. The town had at least one bookstore and a circulating library, and on Sundays, its 1,700 citizens had four churches to choose from: Presbyterian, Methodist, Roman Catholic and Anglican. While Belleville’s finest families lived in solid limestone houses with large sash windows, the town still had no sidewalks, and pigs roamed freely along the muddy streets, gobbling up the garbage. But residents of Belleville were confident that they were in the vanguard of colonial progress: every seventh house had a streetlight in front of it, which was lit on moonless nights so that pedestrians could avoid the puddles and pigshit.
Underneath this urbane surface, however, seethed all the most vicious emotions of the raw young colony. Every kind of prejudice flourished in the town: Tories versus Reformers, Methodists versus Anglicans, Irish versus Scots, Protestants