Flint and Feather by Charlotte Gray

Author:Charlotte Gray [Charlotte Gray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443403030
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

14

“A HALF-BREED BUT SUCH A NICE ONE”: Charles Drayton 1897–1899

THE sound of wild applause was still echoing around the Grand Opera House on December 29, 1897, when Pauline Johnson gave a final curtsey and retired to her dressing room. She had scarcely sat down and kicked off her shoes before there was a loud knock on the door. Checking her reflection in the mirror, she rose and answered the summons. In the dim light of the backstage corridor, she saw a square-jawed, bull-necked young man who immediately thrust a bouquet of flowers at her. Flowers, in the middle of a Winnipeg winter, were a more than extravagant gesture.

Pauline had lots of admirers in Winnipeg, but this particular beau was more persistent than most—and had received more encouragement. His name was Charles Robert Lumley Drayton, and he was twenty-five years old. His story was typical of many of the young men working in Winnipeg in the 1880s and 1890s. He was the younger son of a well-to-do Toronto family who had been sent out to make his way in the West and “help put the ‘Win’ in Winnipeg,” as the locals liked to say. And he was just the type of man to whom Pauline was always drawn: a youthful athlete more than ten years younger than herself, with impeccable English manners.

Charles Drayton’s parents had not been in Canada long. His father, Philip, originally arrived in Ontario as an officer in the British army. He had then been posted to Barbados and, after resigning his commission in 1874, returned to Toronto to settle there with his wife, Margaret Covernton. There was already a Drayton living in Ontario, east of Toronto—Philip’s cousin Reginald Drayton, a British remittance man. Reggie could not have been more different than Philip, the ultra-respectable former army officer. Reggie, a rascal since boyhood, had been sent to the colonies by his clergyman father in Gloucestershire to keep him out of trouble in the Mother Country. His father paid for him to live in the Rice Lake area north of Cobourg with Clinton Atwood (son-in-law of the writer Catharine Parr Traill), who was supposed to teach the irrepressible Reggie how to farm. Unfortunately, Charlie Drayton’s Uncle Reggie had absolutely no time for agriculture but all the time in the world for drinking and hunting.

Perhaps stuffy Philip followed scruffy Reggie to Canada to keep an eye on him; perhaps, as a former army officer with limited means, when he returned to Britain after years in the colonies he felt out of place in a country where engineers and entrepreneurs were the new heroes. By the time the Philip Draytons settled in Toronto, they had two sons: Henry, born in Canada in 1869, and Charles, born in Barbados in 1872. A daughter, named Margaret after her mother, was born in Toronto. At first, the boys’ father remained relentlessly British in loyalty; while he studied and then taught law at Osgoode Hall, he sent his sons to the English public school Harrow.

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