Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [86]
To George Benjamin, however, Susanna’s story was not just an amusing little joke. He was not universally detested: he was a vigorous and imaginative politician who worked hard for his Belleville voters. In 1847 he was elected as the senior official in the area, responsible for all roads, schools and public works. And in 1856 he was elected as a Member of the Parliament of the United Provinces—the first Jew to sit in Parliament anywhere in the British Empire. John A. Macdonald, the Tory leader, told him that, “You may be a leetle wanting in Suaviter. However, your ability is well known to us all.” As Benjamin’s career went from strength to strength, and his influence grew, he waited for an opportunity to settle his scores with a sheriff he had always opposed and the writer who had penned such a venomous caricature.
Chapter 11
Barefoot Crusoes
W hile the Moodies were settling in Belleville, and making important friends and enemies, Catharine and Thomas Traill were living a hand-to-mouth existence. After leaving the bush in 1839, they had rented a little frame house in Ashburnham, the village on the opposite bank of the Otonabee River from Peterborough. The house had a reliable well and an orchard that Thomas looked after. Catharine spent hours in her garden, cultivating the potatoes, carrots, turnips, currants and melons that would see them through the winter. Even in the hardest times, she could never resist planting flowers, too—marigolds, sweet peas, poppies and pinks—to brighten the view from her kitchen window. She had her good friend, Frances Stewart, close by, and Frances’s daughter Ellen Dunlop, to whom she also grew attached. She somehow found the few dollars required to hire a servant to help her with her four children and household chores. Her daughter Annie recalled of these years, “On the whole we were very comfortable.”
But the family’s only income was Thomas’s annual military pension, as he was unable to secure a government job in neighbouring Peter-borough. Susanna Moodie wrote of her brother-in-law: “He has had the mortification of seeing all the places filled up—some by men half his age—and himself passed up.” Catharine scrambled for ways to supplement the family income. She started a small school, and she also began to act as the local nurse and midwife, relying heavily on the herbal remedies on which she was already an expert. Every week her daughter Katie took a basket of eggs, from the flock of about thirty chickens the Traills always kept in their backyard, to market, where they fetched about ten-pence a dozen. Catharine also acquired a couple of geese, which she plucked regularly so she could sell the down (“the quills are not touched, so that the animal suffers but little from the operation”). But all this hard work yielded only pennies. Ever since the Traills and Moodies had arrived in Canada, the parcels that came regularly from Reydon Hall had been an important source of clothes and housekeeping items for each family. These days, Catharine was so dependent on her sisters’ handouts that she wept with relief when their letters and gifts turned up at the Peterborough post office.
Agnes’s letters to Catharine, and her activities in England, provide an interesting counterpoint to the lives of her sisters in Canada. Despite the Stricklands’ lack of means and paucity of aristocratic connections, Agnes was enjoying extraordinary success. Her career as a biographer, which started only after her sisters had arrived in Canada, must have surprised them. In the Regency London that Susanna and Catharine had left behind, the British monarchy had been deeply unpopular. They could recall the intelligentsia sneering at George IV as a lazy drunk and William IV as “Silly Billy.” But everything changed when the petite and prim figure of Victoria, eighteen years old, ascended the British throne in 1837. The young Queen was a magnet for public attention. Victoria’s subjects wanted to know about their monarch’s dresses, jewels