Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [91]
Perhaps a benevolent deity did hover over the Traills, as Catharine believed, shielding her family from complete disaster. It must have seemed that way when the Reverend George Wilson Bridges, an eccentric English cleric, stepped into their lives to rescue them from homelessness. Somehow a copy of The Backwoods of Canada had found its way to Jamaica several years earlier, where it had fallen into the hands of Bridges, then rector of the Parish of St. Anne’s. Bridges had just suffered a series of bizarre and devastating family tragedies. After nineteen years of what he had thought was a happy marriage, his wife had abruptly deserted him, his own family had turned against him, and his four daughters were drowned in a freak sailing accident. Bridges was left in Jamaica with a three-year-old son. Shattered by loss, Bridges read The Backwoods of Canada and decided to abandon the tropical climate and comforts of Jamaica for the chilly and tangled backwoods of Canada. Perhaps he was persuaded by the cheerful warmth of Catharine’s observations, written long before hardship had ground her down. Perhaps a revulsion for the languid, self-indulgent white élite of Jamaican society propelled Bridges to seek a more bracing, self-sufficient life. Whatever the reason, he decided to make Mrs. Traill his model and follow her to Upper Canada. He wrote in a memoir that if he had not “gone wild he would doubtless have gone mad.” In 1837, he arrived in the newly settled community of Gore’s Landing, on the south shore of Rice Lake, twenty-two miles by road and steamer from Catharine.
George Bridges must have cut an extraordinary figure in the wilds of pre-Confederation Canada. A tall, bony man who swept about in brocaded robes and smoking jackets, he was completely out of place among its shabby-coated farmers and merchants. Bridges’s idea of luxury was well-aged port; his neighbours’ idea of luxury was enough chairs in their own homes for every family member to have a seat. Bridges’s neighbours in Gore’s Landing thought the newcomer was indeed mad when he started building a house on the lakeshore. Recklessly oblivious to the extremes of Canada’s climate, Bridges hired local carpenters to erect a six-floored octagonal structure with barred windows and an underground entrance. Then he himself put together tables, chairs and shelves out of red cedar, so the whole house smelled like a Finnish sauna. When the peculiar residence was finished he invited his heroine to visit. In wine made by Bridges from local grapes, he and Catharine toasted his new home and she named it Wolf Tower.
Given Bridges’s history (and his rumoured propensity for opium), it is not surprising that he didn’t last long in the backwoods. His house was a stifling conservatory in the summer months, as the sun beat down on its glass windows, and a lethal icehouse in the winter, when freezing drafts whistled up its six levels and round its open floors. After four years, Bridges had had enough and once again walked away from his life, heading this time to England. But he stayed in touch with Catharine. When he heard how tough things had become for the Traills by April 1846, he offered them Wolf Tower as a rent-free residence.
The offer of free lodgings came in the nick of time for Catharine. She immediately wrote to Susanna, describing just how grim their circumstances had been before Bridges had stepped in: “My dear husband was fretting himself to death and me too, for both my health and spirits were sinking under the load of mental anxiety more on his account than the circumstances, and want of strengthening diet.” She had run out of wood for the stove, flour to make bread, and meat or fish other than the perch that her