Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [92]
“When I came to reside at Wolf Tower,” Catharine would recall in later years, “I came in weak health having scarcely recovered from a long and terrible fit of illness, but so renovating did I find the free, healthy air of the beautiful hills that in a very short time I was quite strong and able to ramble about with my children among the picturesque glens and wild ravines of this romantic spot, revelling in this rich and rare flower garden of nature’s own planting. The children were never weary of climbing the lofty sides of the hills that surrounded the ravine, forming the bed of one of those hill torrents to which they have given the name of ‘The Valley of the Big Stone’ from a huge boulder of grey granite that occupies the centre of it.”
The romance of Wolf Tower lifted Catharine’s spirits. In her mid-forties, Catharine was overweight and unhealthy, and on damp days she complained of aching joints. A network of broken spider veins covered her round cheeks, her blond hair was thinning and stringy, and her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. But now her gurgling laugh echoed up Wolf Tower’s spiralling staircases, and she recovered the sparkle in her bright-blue eyes. During the warm summer months, she enjoyed teaching her children their letters in the fifth-floor conservatory, with its panoramic views of green hills and blue water. She persuaded the newly appointed Anglican minister of St. George’s Church, Gore’s Landing, to conduct open-air church services at the big grey lump of granite her children had named “the Big Stone.” Catharine’s eyes filled with happy tears as she looked around her and thought of the words of her favourite psalm: “The pastures of the wilderness drip; and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks: the valleys also stand so thick with grain that they laugh and sing.” Perhaps the flocks were missing, and the grain was sparse, but as she always liked to insist, “The sight of green things is life to me.”
As an adult, Annie Traill would recall that she and her siblings were “happy as larks” during these years: “We children used to scramble over the hills and ravines, delighting over the beautiful flowers and shrubs which grew so luxuriantly everywhere, and my dear mother, when able, used to accompany us.” Agnes continued to send generous parcels, despite her exasperation with her brother-in-law. One year the parcel contained table cloths, children’s books, German silver spoons, a metal teapot, two coats for the boys, needles, thread, a pair of cutting shears, towelling, a Scottish plaid gown for which Agnes had no more use, six pairs of white stockings, some boots for Catharine and lengths of calico, muslin, blue-check shirting and flannel. “Very acceptable the things will be,” Catharine told Susanna, “for I was beginning to think with wonder how I would find clothing for these poor children, now reduced to worse than bareness.” Agnes had also sent along the latest volume of her Queens of England series, and a copy of the Juvenile Scrapbook: A Gage d’Amour for the Young, an anthology edited by Jane Strickland which contained several pieces by Agnes.
In retrospect, Annie would realize how difficult her mother’s life was during these years. She and her sister Kate did much of the baby care and domestic work, but “the burden fell on [mother] and she was not strong.” James and Harry Traill, in their early teens, worked almost full-time in the fields, because Thomas was a wreck of his former self. Looking at the emaciated and melancholic figure who barely spoke above a clipped whisper, it was hard to believe he had once been a cosmopolitan, well-groomed