Sisters in the Wilderness (27 page)

From now on, Agnes's letters read like chapters from Thackeray's
Vanity Fair.
They were speckled with the names of minor aristocrats, junior politicians and the more literate members of the landed gentry. Agnes's tall, mannish figure and deep voice were soon well known within the
beau monde
of Britain
.
One evening she sat next to the Duke of Wellington: “My early enthusiasm in favour of the hero of a hundred fights has not abated one chit. He was not near as deaf as I had heard.” She spent the summers writing at Reydon Hall, or as a guest in country houses. In 1846, a portrait of Agnes in the purple velvet dress she wore at court was hung in the Royal Academy. The artist, John Hayes, managed to soften the sitter's imperious expression into something closer to a fashionably feminine simper. Further honours glimmered in the ether. “Our little queen,” as Agnes referred to Victoria with proprietorial pride, was even said to have murmured something about a royal pension. Apparently, biographical inaccuracies had been forgiven in the light of Agnes's deluge of deference.

Given that both Susanna and Catharine were as talented as their elder sister, and Susanna was just as ambitious as Agnes, both women must
have asked themselves, as they read Agnes's accounts of literary accomplishments, “What if …?” Had they remained in England, might they too have established themselves as successful authors? Was Agnes's success largely because she had remained “in real and single blessedness,” as she smugly put it, so could devote her time to her books, rather than to husband and children? Agnes had found her metier in the field of royal biography. Might her younger sisters have equalled her triumphs in their own (very different) genres, or might they, at the very least, have ridden her coattails to prosperity?

Catharine did not envy her elder sister. Unlike Susanna, she had never nursed a personal rivalry with Agnes. She had no interest in hobnobbing with the likes of Lady Bedingfield; she lacked the vanity to desire a portrait by a Royal Academician. However, Catharine was finding it just as hard to make ends meet in Ashburnham as she had in the bush. Her little school had failed, and Thomas was again sinking into despair. She had already tried to get a further payment for
The Backwoods of Canada
with a heartfelt appeal to the publisher: “While her little volume is read with pleasure by the talented and wealthy, the writer and her infant family is struggling with poverty and oppressed by many cares.” But this had only yielded a further fifteen pounds, bringing Catharine's total income from
Backwoods—
one of the most widely circulated and best-known books about Canada—to 125 pounds. As Catharine sat in her parlour in Ashburnham and read Agnes's letters, she began to hope that Agnes might help her again. It was Agnes who had found a publisher for
Backwoods
in 1836. Now that Agnes was such a celebrity, surely she could find a publisher for more sketches of life in Upper Canada by Catharine?

Agnes tried. There was every reason to anticipate a warm reception for a manuscript by Mrs. Traill.
The Backwoods of Canada
had been well reviewed, and its first printing of eleven thousand copies had sold quickly. It had been reprinted in 1838, 1839 and 1840, and translated into German in 1838 and French in 1843. Moreover, there was now a vogue for improving and educational material. In 1823, Dr. George Birkbeck had founded the first “Mechanics' Institute” in London—an early form of
public library—to feed what he called “the universal appetite for instruction,” and soon after, every city boasted a similar institute. As literacy spread in the new industrial towns of Victorian England, so did demand for the printed word. The wives of the newly wealthy manufacturing class were not only unprepared to run large family houses, with servants lurking behind green baize doors, they were also ignorant of the manners required in the polite society to which they had been elevated. Even a book with the unappetizing title
What to do with Cold Mutton
went into a second printing. There was an epidemic of encyclopedias for the common man, and of series with titles like Valpy's Family Classical Library, the Edinburgh Cabinet Library and The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, the series in which
Backwoods
had been published. Memoirs and travel books often commanded advances as high as 250 pounds and could make their publishers profits running into four figures.

If anyone could have helped Catharine, it would have been Agnes. Agnes knew the importance of personal contacts and self-promotion. She was an indefatigable hustler and a canny businesswoman: she harangued publishers to issue and distribute her books and secure good reviews for them. As her reputation grew, she negotiated a share of sales revenue in addition to a flat fee for every book she produced. But Agnes had no luck with her sister's manuscript. Her own success reflected the popular demand for history, but the new industrial class didn't want to read about remote forests and North American flora. Catharine was out of touch with English tastes and English publishers. She lived beyond the edge of the known universe for London literary types. Agnes confided to Susanna, “I have failed to obtain anything for [Catharine's] mss. as yet,” and she decided that Catharine must dismember the manuscript and peddle the sketches piecemeal to various periodicals in Britain and Canada. Agnes did manage to place several of the sketches, including two to
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
. But Catharine waited for months for payment, and there is no evidence that
Chambers
ever sent a fee to their Canadian contributor.

Traill fortunes spiralled downwards with each passing year. In 1840,a
fifth baby was born, but Catharine's joy was short-lived: Mary Ellen Bridges Traill died before her first birthday. Catharine had another baby in 1841, a fourth daughter, named Mary Elizabeth Jane, who survived. But within months, Catharine was pregnant again, and her fifth daughter died as an infant in 1843. All her children were constantly sick with earaches, boils, coughs, burns, infected cuts—hardly surprising, since they were starved of protein and fresh fruit and vegetables for most of the year. “Anxious nightwatchings over the cradle of suffering infants have brought down my strength and health,” wrote Catharine. No woman in this period took the survival of a child for granted. Both Catharine and Susanna drew heavily on the Christian certainty that their infants' short lives were not without purpose, and that their babies would live again in heaven. “They are … like sparks struck from the iron to sparkle fly upwards, gladden the eye by their brightness for an instant and be lost in space,” Catharine believed. “Who can say how often the loss of the young child has been the light sent by God to guide the sorrowing parent to the mercy seat of Christ.”

Although Catharine never forgot her dead babies, she had to suppress her own grief for her husband's sake. With each setback, despair weighed more heavily on Thomas. A crescendo of demands from creditors in England, Peterborough and Cobourg forced the Traills into financial crisis. Reluctantly, they left Ashburnham and moved into a run-down farmhouse three miles out of town. Catharine hoped they could achieve self-sufficiency on this modest acreage. Thomas put a down payment on the house and spent his scanty remaining funds on seed and livestock. Catharine insisted everything would be fine, planted yet another garden of marigolds and mallow, and named the house Saville—the name of one of the Traill properties in the Orkneys. Stuck in the bush once again, she drew heavily on her faith that the Lord would provide. She never revealed her loneliness to her husband, who had again withdrawn into the dark recesses of chronic depression. Instead, she fell back on her faith. As she dug and weeded in the kitchen garden, or lifted heavy cast-iron pans of porridge from the stove, she would pause briefly, straighten
her aching back, close her eyes and utter silent prayers. She confided to Ellen Dunlop, “There is no privation I feel more than not having the means of going to church.”

Susanna knew from Catharine's letters that the Traills were in a bad way. Catharine poured out her worries to Susanna: “I feel…like a vessel without a pilot drifting before an overwhelming storm on every side rocks and shoals and no friendly port in sight.…The game of life seems to me a difficult one to play …” Through mutual friends, Susanna heard how Catharine's six children (an eighth baby, William Edward, was born in 1844) were rarely able to leave the house because their clothes were in rags. James, thirteen, and nine-year-old Harry had only one pair of broken and patched boots between them, so they took it in turns to go out into the snowdrifts and bitter winds to find firewood or draw water from the well. The older girls, Kate (now ten) and Annie (eight) could not attend school because they had no shoes, and because Catharine, crippled with rheumatism, relied on them to do the work of the servants that she could no longer afford. Poor little Mary, her youngest daughter, suffered constantly from infected eyes and ears, and cried so much that she wore her mother's patience “to rags.” The little girls helped wash and patch their worn garments, feed the baby, preserve fruits and vegetables and prepare the boiled potatoes, gruel and porridge that was their diet. The Traills were so poor that they could not even afford tallow for candles; at night, Catharine burned pine knots, rich in resin, to provide light.

Susanna could not leave her young family in Belleville to help Catharine, who was two days' journey away. But as often as possible, the Moodies sent the Traills packages of castoff clothes and supplies of tea and sugar. Susanna urged her sister to submit a steady flow of material to Lovell's
Literary Garland
. Grinding poverty was hardly the environment in which the composition of light-hearted articles and stories flourished, but with dogged professionalism, Catharine struggled on, acknowledging that the five-pounds-per sheet fee helped pay off “small annoying debts that we cannot leave unsettled.”

When news of the Traills' move back to the bush reached Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Sarah Strickland, the English sisters were all anxious about Catharine. Unlike Susanna, however, they had no understanding of the brutal hardships she faced. Poverty for the childless Stricklands in Suffolk and London meant frayed cuffs and cheap cuts of meat. They couldn't even imagine the icy horror of barefoot children in a Canadian winter, the sad whimper of a hungry infant or the struggle of a malnourished ten-year-old boy to drag home firewood.

Agnes had never forgiven Catharine for marrying Thomas. She was convinced that all the Traills' troubles were his fault. “Ah, why did she involve her bright days in such a sea of trouble,” Agnes wrote to Susanna in 1841, about Catharine. “There was neither hope nor reason in marrying such a man as our poor brother Traill notwithstanding his many amiable qualities …my heart bleeds at the sacrifice she has made.” But a couple of years later, Agnes was jolted out of her complacency. A rumour reached England that the Traills were “in the last state of destitution and misery.” Agnes was horrified, both by the heart-wrenching details of her sister's poverty and by the idea that her family was the subject of gossip on her own side of the Atlantic. She quickly sent off several parcels of fabric and second-hand clothes. Agnes knew that her parcels were also precious to the Moodies in Belleville, but she explained to her youngest sister that, “The dire straits which poor Kate's circumstances appear to have reached makes it imperatively necessary for me to make a personal sacrifice in order to send her some money, little enough but more than I can spare. Consequently, I have nothing to send for you except a little French cambric …”

Agnes resurrected all her old prejudices as she considered Catharine's problems. “Of course I must give to her who wants the means of existence as I knew she would with that disastrous and ill-judged marriage….I wish I had not been so true a prophetess. It is heartbreaking to think of our poor Kate, who was so kind and deserving of a better fate, becoming the victim of such a marriage. My only wonder is that she has kept the wolf from the door for so long.…
I think Mr. Traill's own kindred ought to try and help him.” But Mr. Traill's own kindred in the Orkneys were already shouldering the responsibility of raising the two sons of his first marriage. They assumed that the grand and well-connected Agnes Strickland would subsidize the Traill ménage in Canada.

Sometimes Thomas must have felt singled out by misfortune. Fired up with fellow feeling for another Scottish immigrant, he had backed a loan for the young Scot to build a mill on the Otonabee River. The young man was drowned, and Thomas found himself obliged to pay his friend's debts. Even run-down, shabby Saville was now beyond his means. Catharine had to pack up her meagre possessions and move out before Thomas had a chance to harvest the crops he had planted. By now, the threat of bankruptcy had rendered him catatonic. “The harrassing state of uncertainty in which we are kept about our future plans is preying dreadfully on Traill's mind,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in 1846, “nor can I rouse him from it.”

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.