Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [79]
Lovell’s support was just the encouragement she needed. He paid according to the quantity of pages (five pounds per sheet) rather than offering a set fee for each contribution, and he printed anything she sent him. The poems, serialized novels and short stories that Susanna produced were written for an English (or at least a British-educated) audience. She assumed that her readers—for the most part, the merchant élites of Montreal and Toronto—would prefer European settings and fastidious heroes. She also sent works that she had written twenty years earlier, in Suffolk. And she began to play with the idea of shaping some of her experiences of the past eight years—her first impressions of Canada, the early months in Hamilton Township, the ups and downs of life in Douro—into sketches for publication.
Alongside her literary compositions, Susanna wrote personal letters to Lovell with all her family news (“I have been busy preparing my boys’ winter clothing”). Once or twice she and John even managed a trip to Montreal to see her editor and visit with his wife, Sara, and their family in their elegant townhouse on St. Catharine Street. “She was a pleasant companion,” Sara would recall. She admired Susanna’s skill with water colours, and was amazed to hear that this English lady often had little Johnnie on her knee as she composed articles. Nostalgia for London tugged at Susanna as she glimpsed the cultured life of Montreal in the 1840s, with its concerts, theatres and soirées.
Susanna entrusted Lovell with the realization of one of her greatest dreams—the purchase of an inexpensive piano. In the backwoods, a piano had become the symbol of the lost state of gentility. Nothing had underlined their cultural and spiritual poverty so much as her inability to accompany herself on the piano when she taught her children the nursery rhymes and hymns of her youth. When Lovell secured one in Montreal and had it crated and shipped up the St. Lawrence to Belleville, Susanna was overjoyed. It almost made up for the ostentatious disregard that her Belleville neighbours continued to show for her literary achievements. At one point, one of her sons arrived home from school looking downcast; he said that another boy had jeered at him that “Mrs. Moodie invents lies, and gets paid for them.”
In spite of their fresh start, sadness and misfortune continued to dog the Moodies. In July 1840, Susanna gave birth to a sickly little boy. Christened George Arthur, after their benefactor the Governor, he clung to life for only three weeks. It was an ill omen. Next, in December, the Moodies’ rented cottage caught fire, and they lost their furniture, clothing and winter stores. They almost lost two-year-old Johnnie, too: he had hidden in the kitchen of the burning building and was rescued only seconds before the roof collapsed. The fire traumatized Susanna, who had suffered one house fire already in the Moodies’ backwoods log cabin, and who was still mourning the death of her infant four months earlier: “The agony I endured for about half an hour [before Johnnie was found] I shall never forget.” Had the calamity occurred in Douro Township, she would have rushed to her sister Catharine for solace. Instead, she poured out her terrors in a letter to her mother and sisters in England. Astringent Agnes replied, “We were all much grieved to hear of your sad loss by fire and the distress it must have been to you and your lovely little flock, but if it had occurred before Moodie got the appointment it would have been of far more serious consequence.”
By 1842, the Moodies had settled into a pleasant house on the corner of Bridge and Sinclair streets, on the western edge of Belleville. Built seven years earlier of local limestone, with a verandah across