Sisters in the Wilderness (28 page)

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 sons caught in the Otonabee. But now Thomas had set off for Wolf Tower “in high spirits
for Traill
,” with their nine-year-old Harry, to plant some spring wheat. A few days later, Catharine and the other five children, plus their furniture, two cows and two sheep, boarded a noisy steam-driven paddle-wheeler, the
Forester
, which took them from Peterborough down the Otonabee River and across Rice Lake to Gore's Landing.

“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 gentleman. His teeth were stained and his hair matted; he looked haunted by anxieties. A Scottish visitor described Thomas
as wearing “a shawl around his neck that one would not have picked out of the gutter and that had not been washed for a month—a nose very much smeared with snuff, hands and face evidently in want of soap and water yet with all this unprepossessing exterior evidently a kind hearted and well informed man.” But Catharine, recalled Annie, was “ever cheerful and ready to tell stories or sing to our dear father in the evening.”

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 Stewart in 1851.The following year, she wrote to Susanna of how she longed to visit her, and enjoy “the great comfort to me of seeing you and talking over many matters that I cannot write.” But she was a resilient woman who had learned to escape gnawing anxieties by taking refuge in nature: the huge maple trees, the scampering chipmunks, the delicate saxifrage and white violets that she carefully pressed between layers of cotton in one of Thomas's books. She also knew what was expected of an English lady: she had seen how her own mother had coped with the loss of her husband when she was forty-six, how she had managed to put a brave face
on adversity. Catherine rarely indulged in grumbles. Instead she forced herself to look on the bright side, reminding herself often that God's grace would protect her. In her daily entries in her journal, Catharine often sounds like the wife of a prosperous gentleman-farmer in Surrey. Gazing out at the distant lake, and watching a cloud of passenger pigeons careen across the mother-of-pearl sky, she noted: “I know of no place more suitable for the residence of an English gentleman's family. There is hardly a lot of land that might not be converted into a park.”

Catharine's determination to keep writing was unquenched, despite Agnes's failure to market her sequel to
The Backwoods of Canada
. She still wanted to publish a book in England, for the audience with whom she had been most popular when she lived there: children who shared her love of nature's bounty. She had been mulling over a particular idea for a young people's novel for nearly ten years. In 1837, she had copied into her journal an advertisement from the Cobourg
Star
that had sparked the idea. “50 pound
REWARD
,” read the headline, and in smaller print below: “Lost on Saturday last the 29th of July on the road leading from Bowskill's mills to Foe's tavern, near the Rice Lake Plains a child about six years old the daughter of Mr. Thos. Eyre of Hamilton near Cobourg. She wore a blue plaid cotton frock and was without her bonnet. Whoever will return the child to her parents or give such information as may lead to her discovery shall receive the above reward. Thomas Eyre.”

The spectre of children lost in the forest was common among Canada's early settlers. It was a real threat, when paths were few, forests dense, and children as young as five were sent off to find lost cattle or take a lunch-pail to men working in the bush. Contemporary newspapers were filled with such heartbreaking tales. The story in the Cobourg
Star
had a happy ending. Mr. Eyre's daughter (improbably called Jane) was found four days later, after a search involving nearly a thousand people. But there were plenty of other youngsters who were never seen again. Both Catharine and her sister Susanna collected anecdotes of such ghastly occurrences. The nightmare of missing youngsters struck to the core of their maternal beings. Such a prospect, in Susanna's view, was “more melancholy than
the certainty of [the child's] death.” It also symbolized the deeper anguish of leaving behind familiar scenes and losing oneself in new and unknown territory.

The details of Jane Eyre's disappearance haunted Catharine's imagination. She brooded over what it would be like to be the little girl who had wandered away from a picnic and suddenly realized that the sun was sinking and she could no longer hear human voices. She put herself in the place of the mother, screaming her child's name into the black wall of silent trees and beating her chest with anguish and self-reproach for having allowed the child out of her sight. By the time she arrived at Rice Lake, Catharine had sold two different versions of the story to
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
and a third to the London annual
Home Circle.
(Like any professional writer, she had no scruples about recycling her material). By the time the third version appeared in 1849, Catharine was well launched on a full-length novel about children lost on the plains on the south shore of Rice Lake.

Catharine first developed the narrative of what was to be
Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains
as a story for her own children. During picnics at the Big Stone, or at bedtime in Wolf Tower, her brood would sit wide-eyed as their mother spun a tale about the world they lived in. The landscape she described was the landscape the Traill children knew—the Big Stone, the wild rice beds of Rice Lake, the local hills and ravines. In the evenings, Catharine would sit at her writing desk and put the story on paper. Writing was both therapy and catharsis for her, as it was for Susanna: an escape from day-to-day anxieties. In March 1850, Catharine reported to Ellen Dunlop, Frances Stewart's daughter, that “I have been writing a little now every night at my Canadian Crusoes, and hope if I keep tolerably well to have the volume ready by the middle of May….I am in good hope of winning fifty pounds when it is ready and that cheers me up to persevere in my work.” By September she was able to write to Ellen, “I have yesterday finished my arduous and fatigueing task of copying the MS of the Canadian Crusoes—354 pages besides some notes.” Two weeks later, Catharine sent off her manuscript to
Agnes, so she and Jane could edit the text and place it with a publisher.