Madam Constantia

by Jefferson Carter

Now I had not thought of that. It was a much-used ferry situate at a point where the traffic from Charlestown separated, a part of the traffic using the boat and crossing to the higher and drier road on the right bank, the rest pursuing the shorter but heavier way through Camden. As a second route the ferry road was of value, and a considerable portion of our supplies came in that way. I knew that there was a half company of the 33rd posted to protect the crossing, but I remembered that the ferry house was on the farther or eastern bank. Probably the detachment also would be on that side.

I had to tell her this, and that I was not sure that the ferry ran at night. “I hope,” I added, “that we shall be able to make the men hear, if it does not. But if we fail we may be detained.”

“All night?” she asked and I thought that I read in her tone not only anxiety but contempt—contempt of my ignorance and inefficiency. “Do you mean that?”

I told her that I feared that we might be detained until daybreak; and with pity I wondered how, fatigued as she was, she would be able to endure a night in the open. “Still, it is not more than two leagues,” I continued, “from the river to the hills, and when we are across the stream we should travel the remainder of the distance in an hour.”

Her only answer was a weary sigh. A minute later we passed from the darkness of the night, which has always a certain transparency, into the black depths of a pinewood. In an instant it was impossible to see a yard before us. The carpet of leaves deadened the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the air was close, and great moths flew into our faces. I pictured bats, the large bats of Carolina, swinging past our heads. The whip-poor-will warned us again and again from the depth of the forest. Still for a time the horses stepped on daintily, feeling their way and snorting at intervals. At last the grey stopped. It refused to proceed. “We must lead the horses,” I said.

“I will,” she cried quickly. “You have only one arm.” And before I could remonstrate I heard her slip from her saddle.

So she had not after all forgotten my arm.

But it was humiliating, it was depressing to follow while she led. And the way seemed to be endless. Once I heard her stumble. She uttered a low cry and the grey shied away from her. She mastered it again, and anew she went forward, though with each moment I expected her to propose that we should halt until the moon rose. Still she persisted, bent on her purpose, and after a long stage of this strange traveling we came forth into the light again. She climbed into the saddle. The horses flung up their heads as they scented the freshness and perfume of the night, and we broke into a trot. I rode up beside her. It was then or a little later, when we had slackened our speed on rising ground that she began to talk to me.

Not freely, but with constraint and an under-note of bitterness which her story explained. At dawn on the morning after my departure from the Bluff she had started to ride to Winnsboro’ to warn her father of his danger. Unfortunately, when she and Tom had traveled a dozen miles they had fallen in with a band of straggling Tories—one of Brown’s bands from Ninety-six, she believed. These men, knowing her to be Wilmer’s daughter and having a grudge against him—and doing no worse than the other side did—had forced her and Tom to dismount and had taken their horses, telling them that they were lucky to escape with no other ill-treatment.

Thus stranded on the way, the two had walked seven miles to a friendly plantation, only to learn that there, too, the horses had been swept off by the same gang of Tories. In the end they had been forced to return to the Bluff on foot. Here there were horses indeed, but they were out on the hill and perforce she rested while they were found and brought in. Again the pair set out, but twenty-four hours had been lost, and ten miles short of the camp she learned from friends that she was too late. A man whom she had no difficulty in conjecturing to be her father had been seized, tried and sentenced on the previous day.