Seeing the door flung open, she raised the weapon, but quickly lowered it when she saw Benjamin Cooper standing inside, holding a valise in each hand.
“Miss Emily?” he called out before spying her on the stairs. He lowered the luggage, saying softly, “Miss Emily …?”
That’s when her mother stepped out from behind the massive carpenter’s body, her brother and sister right behind her.
The blunderbuss fell against the wall, slid down, and tumbled down the steps, but Emily reached the floor long before the weapon landed. She could barely see as tears blinded her, but she felt no shame. Let Cooper, let the whole world see her cry. Let everyone in Ninety Six know that, although she had turned eighteen years old, no matter how tough she acted, how she swore, and drank, and worked in a tavern often full of drunkards, she remained in some ways a frightened little girl.
“Mum!” Emily fell to her knees, feeling Machara Stewart’s arm embrace her, feeling her kiss her sweaty hair. “Mum! Mum. Mum …”
“Emily,” Machara whispered. “Oh, sweet daughter of mine.”
She felt Elizabeth and Alan hugging her.
“Mum …” Emily basked her mother’s warmth.
The door to the tavern closed, but she did not hear Benjamin Cooper walking away.
“Emily,” Alan blurted, “what happened to your face?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Most of the men sat around the long table—the table that had served as Breck Stewart’s bed until he died—sipping coffee, not touching the bread Machara Stewart had baked. They looked at one another, waiting for someone to speak.
It was Emily who broke the silence. She came around the bar, and said, “The deputy provost marshal lying upstairs with the hide flayed off his back said you were cowards. He said you bowed to a bunch of snafflers.” She planted her hands on her hips. “I told him that he was mistaken. Do you dare make a liar out of Breck Stewart’s daughter?”
The cooper, Thomas Taylor, shifted uncomfortably, and said, “It is a delicate situation, Miss Emily.”
“No,” Benjamin Cooper said. “Miss Emily’s right.” But that was all the carpenter said.
After a period of thoughtfulness, Robert Gouedy lifted his mug, sipped, and said, “It is a question we must answer. Do we wait for Lord Montagu to send King George’s redcoats, and risk a revolt? Or do we finish ourselves what we started?”
“They hanged Birmingham Long,” Jonathan Conley said. “Left him swinging in the breeze.”
Virgil Hickox, who had once ridden with the regulators commanded by Breck Stewart as well as those under Donnan’s reign, said, “We should call ourselves the Moderators.”
“Moderators.” Pierre Maupin cursed in French, slammed his fist on the table, and swore again, this time in English. “Regulators. Moderators. We formed the regulators to crush the scoundrels stealing our pigs and horses. And when the regulators become the criminals, we talk of forming a group of moderators. So two years from now, when the moderators begin flogging children and beheading chickens, who will rise up against the moderators? When will this stop?”
“It will not stop,” Robert Gouedy said, staring at the coffee mug in his hand. “It shall never stop. At least, not for a long, long, long, long time.”
Another long silence. Finally Dr. Bayard stood and said, “But the Cane Creek Regulators must be stopped. Yes, moderators. We have always governed ourselves in this district, more or less. We must police ourselves as well.”
Hickox stood, and, shaking his head, moved away from the others, fishing a pipe from his pocket, lighting it by the window with a candle. When he had the pipe smoking to his satisfaction, he looked back at the others. “Are we certain?”
No one responded, until Cooper announced, “I sure miss Breck Stewart.”
Which brought a smile to the faces of a number of the men, as well as Emily’s, then Thomas Taylor cried out, “Breck Stewart! Breck Stewart. It was Breck who got us into this damnable mess.” He stopped abruptly, sucked in a deep breath, and turned, shame-faced, and muttered, “I mean no offense, Miss Emily. Your father was …” His words died and the silence resumed.
Hickox returned to the table, groaning as he sat down, then asking, “Who leads us?”
“Mister Gouedy?” Dr. Bayard asked.
The old trader gestured at his nearby cane. “I am way too old to be galloping across this country.”
“How about that marshal upstairs?” Pierre Maupin said.
“He cannot ride,” Emily assured him. “He can barely stand.”
“It’s why we need sheriffs across the colony,” Dr. Bayard said.
“Save that argument for the Assembly next time you are in Charlestown, Doctor,” Taylor said.
“How many regulators are left among them?” Cooper asked.
Everyone shrugged. The number had always risen and fallen depending on the mood, the weather, the men, and the amount of rum consumed.
“What you must understand,” Gouedy said, “is that there are other regulators, in other regions, in Cheraw, the Peedee, Mars Bluff, the Tyger River. And I dare say that in every one of those regions, men like us, are sitting in some ‘ordinary’ talking about this very same thing.”
Taylor laughed. “I cannot believe …” But then he paused, perhaps realizing that he did believe.
“And if these outlaws, these former regulators, band together …” Dr. Bayard said, shaking his head.
“Then the moderators must join forces,” Maupin said.
“What we speak of …” Taylor began.
“… is civil war,” Gouedy finished for him in the lull.
Emily was relieved that she had sent her mother, Alan, and Elizabeth to the quilting bee at Mrs. Cochrane’s cabin near Spring Branch. Especially when the doors, front and back, slammed open and Donnan, coming in the front, led a group of men inside. James Middleton came through the back. Long rifles and pistols were cocked.
Donnan crooked his finger at Virgil Hickox, and said, “Outside.”
As Hickox left his pipe in the tray and made a beeline for the door, Taylor leaped to his feet, yelling, “You son of a bitch! You damned traitor. You were my neighbor. You were my friend!”
The door closed behind Hickox, and the silence become ominous. Donnan Stewart looked at the men of Ninety Six, then he turned his gaze on Emily. His face held no emotion.
“Do not worry,” Donnan said finally when he looked at the men sitting around the table. “You shan’t swing. But you will pay.” He hooked his thumb. “Outside … all of you. Do as we say, or you will die.”
Middleton’s men came forward, prodding the moderators through the front door. They went hesitantly. Thanks to Virgil Hickox, they had no choice. Emily did not move. Donnan approached her, studied her swollen and bruised face, and laughed.
She wanted to spit in his face, but, instead, asked, “What do you plan to do?”
“I plan, dear Sister, to burn this den of sedition.”
It felt as though her throat was filled with sand. “Donnan, please. Da built this place. With his own hands.” She hated herself for begging.
“And you are responsible for burning it to the ground,” Donnan said. “For you betrayed your own blood.”
She knew she would pay, but she had always found it hard to rein in her anger. Leaning closer to him, she said, “How can I betray my own blood? The only brother I have … is Alan.”
That was the last thing she remembered until she woke up outside, in the cool air, a wet rag on her forehead, blood seeping again from her nose and lips, her head pounding like the hoofs of a thousand cattle were inside it. Then she smelled the smoke.
“Easy,” Dr. Bayard whispered. “Lie still.”
She tried to sit up, but dizziness sent her back onto the grass. When she opened her eyes, she had to lift her hand to shield them from the flames.<
br />
Emily almost broke down completely at the terrible sight, but then fear enveloped her, and she sat up, throwing off the cloth Dr. Bayard was using to wipe her face, and turned her head to vomit. Coughing, she grabbed the lapels of the doctor’s coat and cried out, “Finnian! Finnian! He is upstairs.” Then releasing her grip, she spun away from the doctor, tried to stand but couldn’t. She was blinded by both the blaze and tears, as she willed herself to stand. She stumbled a few steps, then collapsed as Dr. Bayard’s arms wrapped around her waist and pulled her back.
“Let me go! He’ll die! He’ll die!”
“Emily,” Dr. Bayard said.
“Damn you, he’ll die. He’ll …”
“He is all right, Emily. Listen. Benji Cooper got him out of there as soon as the regulators left.”
“Thank God,” Emily whispered as she slipped into the deep void.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She led the marsh tacky dun out of the stable, already saddled, grained and watered well, and ready to ride. She walked the horse past the smoldering ruins of Cormorant’s Rock, and toward the men tightening the cinches on their saddles, saying good bye to their wives, their children, and checking their weapons. She glanced at the blackened timbers, the ashes, and then beyond to the little knoll where a crooked wooden cross marked her father’s grave.
Emily Stewart did not cry.
“Miss Stewart …” Dr. Bayard said, speaking formally as the duly elected captain of the moderators.
She swung into the saddle, hefting a rifle she had stolen from Virgil Hickox’s cabin, and said, “Let any man among you say that I have no right to ride with you …” she waved the rifle at the smoking remains of Comorant’s Rock, “after that.” The rifle came down, and she laid it across her pommel. “Say it,” she said, softer this time. “Say it good and loud. Say it loud enough for my father lying yon to hear.”
Leather creaked as Benjamin Cooper climbed onto his big gray. “She rides with us,” the carpenter said.
This time there were no cheers, no songs. On the morning of July 25, 1768, the fourteen Moderators of Ninety Six loped out of the settlement toward the Cherokee Path.
* * * * *
Shortly after noon on the 30th, they found the long hunter from the Long Canes. He sat by a smoldering campfire at a clearing, staring at the smoke, his horse ground-reined near him, his long rifle leaning in the crook of an oak.
“Teague Braden,” Thomas Taylor said, “are you ready to die?”
Up until that moment, Emily had not known the hunter’s name.
Braden looked up, shrugged, and stared back into the smoke.
Dr. Bayard made a gesture, and Cooper and Maupin swung from their saddles, moving toward the hunter, who seemed oblivious to what was happening. Emily wet her lips, as Luke Zachary, behind her, cocked his long rifle.
Braden lifted his head, found the eyes of Dr. Bayard, and said, “Do you want to know where you will find them?”
“Why would you tell us?” the doctor asked.
The hunter shrugged, and looked back at the smoke.
“He would sell out his friends,” Taylor said, “the same as Virgil Hickox, for thirty pieces of silver. Hang the damned Judas and let us be gone.”
“No,” Emily said. “That is not why he would tell us.”
Braden looked over at Emily.
“He is a good man,” Emily heard herself murmuring. “Deep down.”
“Hell,” Maupin spit, “I suppose they were all good men at one time or another. Suppose I was once, too.”
“Where are they?” the doctor asked after a pause.
Looking back at the fire, Braden answered without any emotion, “The High Hills of the Santee.”
Jonathan Conley snorted. “That is a right far piece.”
“Not from hell,” Braden said, still staring at the smoke.
“It is a trap,” Taylor said. “This rogue sends us to our deaths.”
Emily kept looking at the hunter, and for a moment she felt an urge to turn Ezekiel around, ride back to Ninety Six, take her mother, Elizabeth, and Alan into her arms and forget about Donnan, forget about everything.
“No,” Dr. Bayard said. “I do not think it is a trap.” He turned to one of Gouedy’s trappers, Rory MacCance. “Can you get us there?”
“To the Santee?” MacCance shrugged. “Aye. With pleasure.”
“Doctor?” Luke Zachary called out, and indicated Braden. “What about him?”
Emily looked back at the tired hunter, and heard Dr. Bayard ask, “Do you wish to ride with us?”
“I think not, Doctor,” Braden replied.
“It is a trap!” Taylor bellowed, but the doctor’s head shook.
“Leave him be, Thomas. We ride for the High Hills.”
* * * * *
When MacCance eased his bay horse alongside Dr. Bayard’s mount, Emily kicked Ezekiel and moved closer, just behind the doctor.
MacCance was saying. “The High Hills be a mighty big place.”
“Ouí,” the doctor responded.
Emily was familiar with that region. Perhaps even slightly better than Rory MacCance. Long, narrow, hilly—not really that high, not compared to the mountains north and west of Ninety Six, but substantial if you never got out of the swampy country north of the Santee River.
“Well,” MacCance said, “it could take a lot of looking to find anyone with a mind to hide out there.”
“I know where we will find him,” Emily said, feeling like Judas Iscariot as she wondered what her father would think of her now. She blinked away the image of Breck Stewart, and found Dr. Bayard and Rory MacCance turned in their saddles, looking at her as they trotted through the pine-lined trail.
Bayard tugged on his reins, and MacCance swung his horse around, then reined up.
Pulling Ezekiel to a stop, Emily stopped. “Our grandfather from Georgetown has a summer home there,” Emily said, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “On an oxbow, twelve, fourteen miles up the Wateree before it joins the Congaree.”
Dr. Bayard and MacCance said nothing, just turned around, and kicked their horses into a walk, heading through the forest.
* * * * *
In Camden, they rested themselves and the horses for six hours, had something to drink and stew to eat at the inn—Emily not daring to ask from what animal the meat had been taken. Before they rode south toward the High Hills, Luke Zachary and Jonathan Conley turned back. They gave no reason. No one asked.
Now they numbered twelve.
* * * * *
Stewart’s Rest on the Wateree lay roughly thirty miles, almost exactly due south, from Camden.
On the morning of the second day, the moderators ran into a group of twenty-six riders from the Welsh Neck. The riders stopped their mounts several rods ahead, then a lean man rode forward, a dirty piece of homespun muslin tied to the top of his musket. When he reined up, Emily whispered to Dr. Bayard, “That is Owen Devonald.”
“I remember him. Captain of the Peedee Regulators.”
Dr. Bayard and MacCance rode out to parley with the innkeeper. They spoke for several minutes before loping back.
When the doctor began talking, Emily’s stomach started to seesaw. She had not really believed what Robert Gouedy had said back in the tavern in Ninety Six, the rumors she had heard from other travelers. What was happening along Cane Creek could not be happening elsewhere, but it was. Owen Devonald and his bunch, who called themselves liberators, joined the moderators in riding against the fifteen scavengers who had once rid the Peedee area of ruffians and killers.
Joining up, they rode south. Now they were thirty-eight.
* * * * *
Compared to the Georgetown plantation, it was a small place. A one-story house, whitewashed, standing out among the pines, a privy and cistern out back, barn to the le
ft, and, on the right, a cabin for the slaves her grandparents always had accompany them.
As Emily looked across the yard, she tried, but failed, to block out the memories of herself and Donnan playing hopscotch with some of the slave children in the yard in what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“How many?” Dr. Bayard asked.
“Ten,” MacCance replied. “Just ten.”
“Your boys, then,” Owen Devonald said. “Not our’n.”
MacCance’s head bobbed.
Dr. Bayard asked, “Are you saying you want to sit this one out, Devonald?”
The man spat. “Hell, no. My boys be itching to fight, and there be no guarantee that we’ll ever catch those scum who once called themselves Peedee Regulators.”
“We can burn them out,” MacCance said.
“You are not burning my grandparents’ summer home,” Emily said sharply.
“What the hell?” Devonald spit again. He leaned forward, pushed back his hat, and swore again. “You got a damned snot-nosed girl …?” He paused as recognition came to him. “Oh, hell no, you got Breck Stewart’s daughter!”
* * * * *
It was Benjamin Cooper who came up with the idea.
One of the Peedee boys, a good Baptist named Oliver, spurred his buckskin out of the woods and straight for the house, firing one pistol into the air, sliding it into the pommel holster, and drawing the other.
“Moderators!” he cried out, reining in the horse to a sliding stop in front of the main house. “Moderators are coming!”
The door opened. Emily couldn’t identify the man on the porch who aimed his pistol at Oliver.
“Moderators!” Oliver yelled again, and shot into the air before wheeling his horse around.
A man came out of the slave’s cabin, and Emily recognized James Middleton.
Oliver saw him, and cried out, “Mister, I ride with David Clarke’s bunch from the Peedee. I reckon we are about the same as you boys. Well, there’s a bunch of citizens aiming to hang us all … and you boys, too. They call themselves moderators and … hell’s fire, they’s no more than ten minutes behind me. Best light out whilst you can.” Then he spurred his horse, and thundered past the privy, through the empty fields, and into the woods that ran along the river.
The Cane Creek Regulators Page 19