Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [93]
With the onset of winter, it became evident that Wolf Tower was a hopelessly impractical residence to keep warm, and the Traills soon moved on. But they liked the area so much that they didn’t move far. For the next couple of years, they rented another house, which they called Mount Ararat, near the Rice Lake Plains, as the lake’s rolling south shore was known. Catharine’s stamina, not to mention her good humour, was extraordinary: her ninth and last baby was born in 1848, when she was forty-five. (He was named Walter in memory of Thomas’s oldest son, who had died at age thirty, three years earlier.) She was constantly bothered by excruciating attacks of rheumatism. “I cannot now lift my hand to my head without great pain,” she wrote to Susanna in 1849, “nor can I put it back without being forced to scream out with the agonising pain I endure in moving it….I suffer at times great pain in my right knee …” Yet her children could always bring a smile to her face. One day, her daughter Annie would later recall, her mother discovered that a set of silver teaspoons, each bearing the Traill family crest, had disappeared. The set was one of the few possessions from home that Thomas and Catharine still possessed. When Catharine questioned her children, each in turn denied that he or she had touched the precious spoons, until the inquisiton reached five-year-old William. The little boy confessed that he had planted the spoons in the garden, to make them grow. His father and elder brothers rushed outside to dig them up, but the child could not recall where he had buried them. They never turned up, but Catharine loved to tell the tale for the rest of her life.
In 1849, Catharine saw a wooden house just east of Gore’s Landing that she decided they must buy. Oaklands was a large log cabin, which meant it had pokey windows and was dark inside, but it had a substantial stone chimney. It was also cheap, because it stood on the top of a windy hill and was miles from the woodlot. Raising the down payment was a problem for the penniless Traills, but Catharine found a way. For years, Thomas had clung to his officer’s commission as the qualification that would secure for him the elusive government job. Now his wife persuaded him that, at fifty-two, he would do better to cash the commission in and use the proceeds to buy the house. Thomas raised some additional funds by borrowing from his brother-in-law Sam Strickland and from John Moodie. After ten wretched years of rented, borrowed or mortgaged houses, in 1849 the Traills once again had their own home. It was not ideal: bitterly cold north winds swept across the hills, reminding Catharine of the east winds that swept along the Norfolk coast in January, and Oaklands was a difficult house to heat. Catharine wrote to a friend one January, “We sit in the small parlour and keep but two fires, consequently the bedrooms are cold.” But the Traills finally felt settled.
The move did little for Thomas, however, who remained in a permanent and paralyzing state of depression. “I cannot endure to see my poor husband so utterly cast down,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in Belleville. “I wish that he could look beyond the present and remember that the brightest of earthly prospects endure but for a season—and it is the same with the trials and sorrows of life—they too come to an end.”
From time to time in her own correspondence, Catharine reluctantly confided her own bouts of despair. “There is a cloud gathering over us that I see no means of averting,” she told Frances