Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [76]
Mrs. Margaret Simpson’s tavern, where the Montreal–Toronto coaches changed horses, buzzed with partisan gossip.
By the time John Dunbar Moodie had secured a permanent job in Belleville, he was well aware that the town pulsed with bad blood. As he strode down Front Street in his military uniform, he endured the catcalls of those who had supported the rebels in ’37. In Mrs. Margaret Simpson’s smoky tavern on the waterfront, he heard the Scots immigrants sneer at the “Paddies” and watched the Irish immigrants come to blows with the “damn Yankees.” He was at the opening of Belleville’s most imposing new building—the county jail—which immediately filled up with drunks, debtors, cheats, violent criminals and thieves. The level of partisan sniping and name-calling was enough to discourage even an optimist like John. “I sometimes wish I could clear out from this unhappy distracted country where I see nothing but ultra selfish Toryism or Revolutionary Radicalism,” he wrote in 1839. “The people in this part of the country are split into some three or four factions—The Catholics harbouring dark designs under an hypocritical profession of loyalty and Orangemen goading them on to rebellion by claiming all the loyalty in the country to themselves—while the native Canadians [second- and third-generation immigrant families] are hugging the loaves and fishes as their own peculiar perquisite, agreeing with the others on hardly any one point but in hatred of the Scotch and their Church.”
In the early days of 1840, however, John was too eager to see Susanna and their five children to dwell on Belleville’s shortcomings. He had a new job and a new house, and he was going to make a new start in the new decade! He strutted past the unpainted frame houses that sprawled untidily along Bridge Street and Front Street, the two main streets that intersected on the banks of the Moira River, carefully avoiding the potholes and happily greeting passers-by. He was good at remembering names, and he delighted in offering cheery hellos to every lawyer, merchant, housewife and child he bumped into. Short and plump, his vest straining across his belly and his ready smile almost obscured by his mutton-chop whiskers, he radiated geniality. At last, after two years of almost constant separation, he could dream about cosy evenings with his family grouped around the fireside in the pretty, neat little cottage he had rented and furnished. He could imagine Susanna’s relief that she no longer had to struggle out in the chill of a January morning to milk the cows; instead, she could purchase staples at a store. He could almost hear little Agnes and Katie singing nursery rhymes as he accompanied them on his flute. He smiled as he imagined his three sons chasing chickens in their yard. Most of all, John longed to show Susanna the china tea service he had recently purchased. There could be no more satisfactory symbol of Susanna’s release from the backwoods, he fervently believed, than the chance to return to the old Reydon Hall custom of taking tea at four o’clock each afternoon in bone china cups.
On the third day of January, Susanna, Jenny and the children arrived in Belleville after a long and freezing journey from Peterborough through Cobourg. Thin-lipped with cold, Susanna was tearful and nauseated, and in no mood to be cheered up by bone china. Her first bit of news for John, as she pressed little Johnnie, now fifteen months, into her husband’s arms, was that she was once again expecting a baby. John had made a brief visit home the previous November—just long enough to conceive their sixth child.
Although Susanna