Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [89]
Traill fortunes spiralled downwards with each passing year. In 1840,a fifth baby was born, but Catharine’s joy was short-lived: Mary Ellen Bridges Traill died before her first birthday. Catharine had another baby in 1841, a fourth daughter, named Mary Elizabeth Jane, who survived. But within months, Catharine was pregnant again, and her fifth daughter died as an infant in 1843. All her children were constantly sick with earaches, boils, coughs, burns, infected cuts—hardly surprising, since they were starved of protein and fresh fruit and vegetables for most of the year. “Anxious nightwatchings over the cradle of suffering infants have brought down my strength and health,” wrote Catharine. No woman in this period took the survival of a child for granted. Both Catharine and Susanna drew heavily on the Christian certainty that their infants’ short lives were not without purpose, and that their babies would live again in heaven. “They are … like sparks struck from the iron to sparkle fly upwards, gladden the eye by their brightness for an instant and be lost in space,” Catharine believed. “Who can say how often the loss of the young child has been the light sent by God to guide the sorrowing parent to the mercy seat of Christ.”
Although Catharine never forgot her dead babies, she had to suppress her own grief for her husband’s sake. With each setback, despair weighed more heavily on Thomas. A crescendo of demands from creditors in England, Peterborough and Cobourg forced the Traills into financial crisis. Reluctantly, they left Ashburnham and moved into a run-down farmhouse three miles out of town. Catharine hoped they could achieve self-sufficiency on this modest acreage. Thomas put a down payment on the house and spent his scanty remaining funds on seed and livestock. Catharine insisted everything would be fine, planted yet another garden of marigolds and mallow, and named the house Saville—the name of one of the Traill properties in the Orkneys. Stuck in the bush once again, she drew heavily on her faith that the Lord would provide. She never revealed her loneliness to her husband, who had again withdrawn into the dark recesses of chronic depression. Instead, she fell back on her faith. As she dug and weeded in the kitchen garden, or lifted heavy cast-iron pans of porridge from the stove, she would pause briefly, straighten her aching back, close her eyes and utter silent prayers. She confided to Ellen Dunlop, “There is no privation I feel more than not having the means of going to church.”
Susanna knew from Catharine’s letters that the Traills were in a bad way. Catharine poured out her worries to Susanna: “I feel…like a vessel without a pilot drifting before an overwhelming storm on every side rocks and shoals and no friendly port in sight.…The game of life seems to me a difficult one to play …” Through mutual friends, Susanna heard how Catharine’s six children (an eighth baby, William Edward, was born in 1844) were rarely able to leave the house because their clothes were in rags. James, thirteen, and nine-year-old Harry had only one pair of broken and patched boots between them, so they took it in turns to go out into the snowdrifts and bitter winds to find firewood or draw water from the well. The older girls, Kate (now ten) and Annie (eight) could not attend school because they had no shoes, and because