Sisters in the Wilderness (8 page)

Cattermole was not the only huckster selling rainbows. A volume entitled
The Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada
by a Captain Charles Stuart should have been renamed
The Pilgrim's Guide to the Celestial Regions,
according to another settler, E.A.Talbot. Salesmen like Cattermole and Stuart presented the gloomy acres that were available in the most attractive language, and soon John was musing about the possibility of an “estate” in the New World, as if he were talking about a grouse moor in Scotland. Neither Cattermole nor Stuart mentioned the monumentally hard work required to clear the land of dense forest growth, the total absence of everything most English people considered essential to their comfort, or the loneliness and poverty that settlers faced in the early years.

The combination of Reid's anecdotes and Cattermole's gush, plus the cheerful letters that arrived at Reydon Hall from Sam Strickland, captivated John Moodie. He decided that, if he couldn't return to South Africa, Canada was an acceptable alternative. Retired and half-pay officers were eligible for free grants of several hundred acres of land there, in the hopes that, in the event of invasion from the south, they would form the core of an instant defence force. It was only twenty years since the Americans had mounted an invasion of Upper Canada, and relations between the United States and Britain remained uneasy. John, being the type who was convinced he could make a go of any adventure, began to muse on the excitements of life as a landowner in Upper Canada. He grumbled about their cramped life in Southwold and complained to his sister-in-law Agnes that he was “Suffolkating.” Agnes couldn't imagine why anybody would want to live in a colony where there were no theatres, libraries or stately homes. But she always had a soft spot for “brother Moodie,” so she didn't try to discourage him.

London cartoonists warned gullible emigrants that the promises of hucksters like William Cattermole were worthless.

The prospect of emigration appalled Susanna. She did not want to leave England. She shared many of Agnes's reservations about a land with no history, no literature and no cultural life. But she had to admit that she and John were going nowhere in England, and there would be little they could promise their children for the future. And she knew that she would meet her brother in Canada, instead of South Africa's lions, elephants and snakes. “You must not be surprised at our flight in the spring,” she confided to her friends the Birds. John set about getting letters of recommendations to various Upper Canadian nabobs in order to smooth his path through the colony. Letters of introduction, establishing the holder's social standing, were crucial door-openers for gentlemen emigrants to a society where jobs were allocated by patronage. With a letter from the right patron, a half-pay officer could get his name on the list of candidates for such desirable appointments as customs officer, postmaster or sheriff. John started to play the patronage game even before he crossed the Atlantic.

News that the Moodies were planning to emigrate shook Susanna's sister Catharine to the core. Throughout the stormy progress of the Moodie romance, Catharine had been quietly nursing a broken heart. For more than a year, she had been in love with Francis Harral, son of the editor of
La Belle Assemblée.
When the romance went off the rails, Catharine sank into a depression and was barely able to write. At the Moodies' wedding, Susanna noticed that “my dear Katy [looked] butsoso.”

Realizing that Catharine was in a bad way, the Stricklands' widowed cousin, Rebecca Leverton, swept her off first to Bath, then to Oxford and finally to her country house in Herefordshire. Throughout the fall of 1831, Catharine obediently and passively trailed after her relative through fashionable drawing rooms. “Mrs. Leverton is very kind to me and treats me with the greatest confidence as a friend and a child at the
same time,” she reported. But when she heard about the Moodies' intentions, Catharine snapped into action. She made plans to return to Suffolk to see Susanna, “as I could not endure the thought of parting from her at a distance and possibly for years, perhaps for life.”

Catharine returned to Reydon Hall, and every afternoon, often with Jane or Agnes, strolled along to Southwold where the Moodies were installed in a cottage overlooking the grey North Sea. The newlyweds were the perfect advertisement for marriage: John played his flute and made his sisters-in-law laugh, while Susanna beamed with unaccustomed happiness. And Catharine was not the only visitor to the clifftop cottage: soon after the Moodies moved to Southwold, Thomas Traill, an old friend of John's, came to stay with them. Like John, Thomas was a Presbyterian Scot and a half-pay officer who came from the impoverished Orkney gentry. Both had served in the Royal (Northern) Fusiliers during the final years of the Napoleonic wars. The Traill family estate, Westove, near the little town of Kirkwall, was as run-down and mortgaged as the Moodie estate had been. Westove had once been a seat annual income of 18,000 to 30,000 pounds (equivalent to at least a million pounds today) from its harvest of sea-kelp, which was used in the manufacture of glass. But when straw, a far cheaper alternative, was discovered to be equally effective as a chemical reagent and source of potash, Traill fortunes plummeted. Unfortunately, the Traills went on living like lords for some years, saddling the estate with a pile of hopeless debts. Now Thomas could expect no dividends from Westove's farms or its sea-kelp harvest.

Thomas Traill had served in the Napoleonic wars with John Moodie: in 1832, he was a balding widower of uncertain means.

John and Thomas were complete opposites in looks and personality. Where John Moodie was short, bearded and plump, Thomas Traill was tall, thin, balding and clean-shaven. While John was jovial and energetic, Thomas was reserved and sedentary. John enjoyed a convivial pipe of tobacco surrounded by friends; Thomas silently took snuff. John always had a smile on his face; a gloomy expression characterized Thomas. While John Moodie liked to see himself as a man of action, Thomas Traill saw himself as a scholar—he had attended Wadham College, Oxford, spoke several languages and adored highbrow chat with fellow intellectuals. One of his closest friends was John Lockhart, son-in-law and biographer of Britain's hugely successful novelist Sir Walter Scott. And while John Moodie had presented himself to Susanna free of family responsibilities, Thomas Traill arrived on the scene in 1831 as a thirty-eight-year-old newly widowed father of two teenage boys. He had left his sons, Walter and John, with a relative in Scotland and moved to London, like his fellow officer John Dunbar Moodie, to find some congenial company and, perhaps, a wife.

As the winter winds whistled across Southwold beach, and Susanna Moodie awaited the arrival of her baby, it didn't take long for Thomas and Catharine to become close. Both were lonely and recovering from the abrupt end of cherished relationships. Both were great readers. Catharine's serenity and optimism were irresistible to Thomas, who himself admitted of his own temperament, “I am not disposed to be sanguine about anything.” He recognized that her kindness and unshakable faith offered him a sense of security that he had never been able to achieve for himself. And Catharine found in Thomas what she had feared she would lose in Susanna's departure—a close friend who offered companionship, and who needed her.

The atmosphere in the Moodies' cottage was charged with the sexual chemistry between Susanna and John. John had already learned to tiptoe around Susanna's moodiness while overwhelming her with lusty affection. “Ah, he is so kind, so good, so indulgent to all my wayward fits,” Susanna wrote of her husband soon after their wedding, “that I look up
to him as to my guardian Angel. I seem to lose my own identity in him, and become indifferent to every thing else in the world …my heart will never grow old or cold to him.” What could be a better advertisement for marriage than the picture of John and Susanna so passionately in love, and so excited about the impending arrival of their first child? Their parlour was a hothouse for the budding romance between Catharine and Thomas, neither of whom could spontaneously generate the erotic intensity that characterized the Moodies.

The Moodies were overjoyed to see Catharine blossom in the glow of Thomas's love. But Catharine's mother and sister Agnes disapproved strongly of her suitor. Now that their mother rarely ventured beyond the kitchen gardens of Reydon Hall, the Strickland sisters all turned to Agnes for approval. Agnes, a take-charge kind of person, did not think much of Thomas. He was nine years older than Catharine, and had none of John Moodie's
joie de vivre
to offset his shortcomings. He lacked the manly virtues of energy, courage and decisiveness that Catharine's father, Thomas Strickland, had embodied. Furthermore, he was encumbered with debts, teenage children and a morose temperament.

Catharine's docile temper aside, she had a will powerful enough to make up for her fiancé's reticence. She was determined not to let her bossy older sister or anybody else sabotage this relationship. And besides, both Catharine and Thomas were infected by the Canada-mania that had captured the Moodies. Susanna and Catharine began to discuss the notion of leaving England
together
—waving goodbye to their own pinched circumstances and their husbands' failing Scottish fortunes and venturing overseas to meet again with their brother Samuel. They helped each other collect the clothes they would need for a voyage across the ocean and a new life in the New World: flannel petticoats, sturdy boots, knitted stockings, warm cloaks.

Events moved quickly through 1832. In late February, after a long and painful labour, Susanna and John's first baby was born. John doted on his “dab-chick,” as he called his daughter. She was christened Catherine Mary Josephine at St. Edmund's Church, Southwold. A couple of
months later, on May 13, Thomas and Catharine were married in Reydon's squat little parish church, St. Margaret's. Agnes and Jane Strickland acted as bridesmaids as Catharine floated up the aisle on John Moodie's arm. Mrs. Strickland sat in the front pew, her teeth gritted with disapproval. At the altar rail, Thomas slipped onto Catharine's finger the thin gold band that in the years ahead she would never remove even for a moment—neither when she was elbow-deep in laundry suds, nor when her hands were knotted and swollen with arthritis. In later years, Agnes recalled the Traills' marriage as a most upsetting affair, from which her mother never really recovered. But Catharine insisted in a letter to James Bird that, “My dear husband is … all that a faithful heart can desire in a partner for life.”

By the end of the month, both the Traills and the Moodies had said their goodbyes at Reydon Hall. The Traills left first. On a long, curving Suffolk beach, Catharine and Susanna clung to each other, both wondering whether they would survive to meet again on another continent. Thomas finally persuaded his wife to join him in the rowboat, and they were carried out to
The City of London
, the little steamer that paddled up the east coast of England and southern Scotland each week, calling in at all the seaside towns between London and Leith, the little port close to Edinburgh. Out at sea, Catharine stood at the rail of the steamer. She slipped her hand into her husband's, but she never took her eyes off the figure on the beach.

From Leith, the Traills travelled on to Thomas's birthplace in the Orkneys, so that Thomas could introduce his new wife to his family and at the same time inform them of his plans to emigrate. One of his cousins told Thomas that Catharine was “a lovely, bright, sunny thing to take out to the untracked wilds of a new country.” But the hard-headed islanders knew that the Thomas Traills had little alternative. Within a few weeks, Thomas and Catharine were in the port of Greenock, outside Glasgow on Scotland's west coast, looking for a ship to take them across the Atlantic.

Days after the Traills left, it was the Moodies' turn. Susanna stood on
the coastal steamer's deck and listened for the last time to the bells of St. Edmund's, summoning parishioners in the little village of Southwold to morning service. Slipping out of sight were the windmills and church towers of her childhood, and the bright green fields filled with spring wheat. “To leave England at all was dreadful,” she would write later. “To leave her at such a season was doubly so.” The Moodies, with their tenweek-old baby, intended to sail directly to North America.