Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [82]
After Eliza Baldwin’s death, her husband was subject to crippling bouts of depression that paralyzed him for weeks, even while he was co-premier of the United Provinces. He insisted that, at his death, his coffin should be chained to Eliza’s. Most important, he asked that his body be operated on: “Let an incision be made into the cavity of the abdomen extending through the two upper thirds of the linea alba.” It was a simulation of the primitive Caesarean section that Eliza had undergone for the birth of her fourth child, which had ultimately led to her death. When Robert Baldwin finally passed away, his daughter Maria ignored this gruesome instruction, but a month after the funeral (the largest ever seen in the colony), his son discovered the instruction in a pocket of one of his father’s old jackets. In morbid obedience, he insisted that the corpse be exhumed so the ghastly procedure could be performed.
The Moodies first met Robert Baldwin when he was thirty-six, soon after their arrival in Belleville. Baldwin had come to Belleville because he wanted to represent Victoria District (renamed Hastings County in 1843) in the new United Provinces assembly. The Moodies were instantly drawn to someone who, like themselves, was furious to find himself squeezed between those who had taken up arms against legitimate authority and the blinkered upholders of British tradition and privilege. They were entirely in accord with a man who symbolized the landholding class, yet advocated gradual change. The Moodies’ views were shifting. The tremendous adjustments they had made to survive in the backwoods and their newfound ability to hold their own in the New World had made them question the wisdom of decisions about the colony being made five thousand miles away in London, by strangers for whom Canada was just another British possession, along with India, Bermuda and New Zealand.
Along with Baldwin, the Moodies began to think that British North America would only flourish if its elected representatives, who knew the rural areas as well as the cities, had some say in how the colony should develop. But such cautious thoughts as these branded the Moodies as “traitors and rebels” within Belleville’s professional circles, and no better than the malcontents who had marched down Yonge Street in 1837. Belleville’s Loyalists, such as the Bensons and Dougalls, “arrogated the whole loyalty of the colony to themselves,” noted a disgusted Susanna.
Baldwin often dropped by the Moodies’ cottage during his campaigns. “If you have any regard for me, Mrs. Moodie,” he said to Susanna one evening, “pray don’t ask me to eat. I am sick of the sight of food.” The custom throughout rural Canada was to ply any visitors with huge meals, and to take offence if they didn’t stuff themselves. In the run-up to an election, Baldwin had daily been invited to dinners that featured ham, roast and boiled meat and fowl, puddings, custards and cakes, cheese and apple pie. Susanna thought it was hilarious that Baldwin’s principal political supporters “literally almost killed him with kindness,” and she was flattered that he treated her as someone who knew that such excess was unnecessary. At the Moodies’ home, the distinguished Toronto lawyer preferred to bounce their children on his knee and talk earnestly about his vision of Canada as a bicultural nation. John valued Baldwin’s “calm and forbearing spirit,” and Susanna could never resist a clever, sentimental man who wrote poetry, repeatedly told her how much he admired her work and read her children’s stories aloud to his own children. Baldwin made Susanna and John feel they had soul-mates beyond Belleville: enlightened and educated people who weren’t mired in petty parochial disputes, and who believed Canada would one day be a major nation. Although John continued to insist that, as sheriff, he was above politics, in practice both he and Susanna were drawn into the Reformers’ fold. Baldwin convinced them that responsible government was not synonymous with such