Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [90]
Susanna could not leave her young family in Belleville to help Catharine, who was two days’ journey away. But as often as possible, the Moodies sent the Traills packages of castoff clothes and supplies of tea and sugar. Susanna urged her sister to submit a steady flow of material to Lovell’s Literary Garland. Grinding poverty was hardly the environment in which the composition of light-hearted articles and stories flourished, but with dogged professionalism, Catharine struggled on, acknowledging that the five-pounds-per sheet fee helped pay off “small annoying debts that we cannot leave unsettled.”
When news of the Traills’ move back to the bush reached Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Sarah Strickland, the English sisters were all anxious about Catharine. Unlike Susanna, however, they had no understanding of the brutal hardships she faced. Poverty for the childless Stricklands in Suffolk and London meant frayed cuffs and cheap cuts of meat. They couldn’t even imagine the icy horror of barefoot children in a Canadian winter, the sad whimper of a hungry infant or the struggle of a malnourished ten-year-old boy to drag home firewood.
Agnes had never forgiven Catharine for marrying Thomas. She was convinced that all the Traills’ troubles were his fault. “Ah, why did she involve her bright days in such a sea of trouble,” Agnes wrote to Susanna in 1841, about Catharine. “There was neither hope nor reason in marrying such a man as our poor brother Traill notwithstanding his many amiable qualities …my heart bleeds at the sacrifice she has made.” But a couple of years later, Agnes was jolted out of her complacency. A rumour reached England that the Traills were “in the last state of destitution and misery.” Agnes was horrified, both by the heart-wrenching details of her sister’s poverty and by the idea that her family was the subject of gossip on her own side of the Atlantic. She quickly sent off several parcels of fabric and second-hand clothes. Agnes knew that her parcels were also precious to the Moodies in Belleville, but she explained to her youngest sister that, “The dire straits which poor Kate’s circumstances appear to have reached makes it imperatively necessary for me to make a personal sacrifice in order to send her some money, little enough but more than I can spare. Consequently, I have nothing to send for you except a little French cambric …”
Agnes resurrected all her old prejudices as she considered Catharine’s problems. “Of course I must give to her who wants the means of existence as I knew she would with that disastrous and ill-judged marriage….I wish I had not been so true a prophetess. It is heartbreaking to think of our poor Kate, who was so kind and deserving of a better fate, becoming the victim of such a marriage. My only wonder is that she has kept the wolf from the door for so long.… I think Mr. Traill’s own kindred ought to try and help him.” But Mr. Traill’s own kindred in the Orkneys were already shouldering the responsibility of raising the two sons of his first marriage. They assumed that the grand and well-connected Agnes Strickland would subsidize the Traill ménage in Canada.
Sometimes Thomas must have felt singled out by misfortune. Fired up with fellow feeling for another Scottish immigrant, he had backed a loan for the young Scot to build a mill on the Otonabee River. The young man was drowned, and Thomas found himself obliged to pay his friend’s debts. Even run-down, shabby Saville was now beyond his means. Catharine