(Link to Part I)
George laughed and tugged off the trailing fabric. “Fare thee well little brother, Captain Judas Iscariot,” he said, giving a mock salute. “I hopes you enjoy your visit with your angel for you surely need one, even if she ain’t deserve you.”
He picked up the reins and the gravel cracked underneath the wheels as the horse stepped forward. The horse flickered its tail and snorted frosty puffs as she set off down the drive, leaving behind a Jude Royer and his wordless rage.
Charles Angell owned the biggest dry goods store in Frederick, a flour mill outside the town, a tannery in a crossroad village a few miles away and now a shoe factory next to the depot. He’d used his growing wealth to build a house in the fashionable ponderous style, with gothic arches above the windows, an Italianate porch and one of those new French mansard roofs for the attics.
Charles Angell wore his self-acquired wealth loosely, proud of his affluence, prouder that he’d worked for it, and like many self-made men, overestimated his own capabilities in the fields outside the ones making him wealthy. Jude respected him all the same and was surprised Charles Angell took warmly to his courtship of his only child despite being the youngest son of a country farmer.
He hoped Mr. Angell sensed in him the same drive to achieve success through hard work, and he did want a comfortable life, a handsome house of his own and security from the economic risks of the world. He’d damned if he’d let his brothers make him feel guilty for wanting so. And he’d be doubly damned if he’d let the past trap his future.
“Mrs. Angell’s been anxious for you all day ‘cause of the weather, and of course Eliza claims she ain’t been pining for you,” Charles Angell, the thoroughly bald and gregarious man, said with a wink. “We’re still mighty glad for your visit. Your mother doing well? By the by, the papers are saying the army in Georgia’s surrendering control of the state arsenals to the secessionists today.” He shook his head. “A real mess for Mr. Lincoln. What can he do?”
He escorted Jude into the dining room to be embraced by the overdressed and slightly silly Mrs. Angell, who attempted to foist too many refreshments upon him. After a courteous lunch during which Charles Angell and Jude discussed the latest exchange rates between Maryland and Virginia banks, the senior Angells left Jude and Eliza to the parlor, an anticipation that had heightened as the clock ticked closer to the hour he’d have to catch train back to Baltimore.
Then he saw the expression on Eliza’s face.
“Something’s bothering you, Jude,” she said as soon as her mother closed the parlor door.
He gaped at her.
The severity of a country Lutheran childhood prevented him from calling Eliza Angell a beauty, but he did call her pretty with the justifications of a man who believes he loves a woman, even if her pleasant cheeks and even teeth were not as distinctive as her air of quiet competence. Charles Angell liked to see his only child dress well and today she resembled any prosperous lady in Baltimore, wearing a plaid dress with large burgundy cuffs and a lace collar and her only jewelry a small gold cross around her neck. She wore her blond hair in a braided wreath tucked inside a net.
Jude knew she was happiest in the kitchen with flour on her apron, making pies and sweet buns with the Irish cook. Still, Eliza knew her role and what people expected of her. She gathered her hoops and settled into a varnished ladies’ chair. The squat chair sat low with a high back, so she could spread her skirts around her, making her look like a china doll lain against a pedestal.
No doll had the astute look she gave her fiancé.
“Seeing Mr. Royer before he died must have been difficult. I admire you for coping so well with your grief.”
Jude leapt from his chair.
He irritably picked up a porcelain shepherd from the marble mantle and cradled it in his hand. “There wasn’t much I could do,” he said curtly.
He could look at Eliza in the ornate mirror above the fireplace. He’d first fallen in love with her when they were children and he saw her in her father’s store. The initial attraction, based on an awe of her status as a town girl and her family’s comforts, grew into a friendship when he boarded at the high school in Frederick and became an engagement the year he graduated from Dickinson College, with an understanding they would marry once he could buy a suitable house.
He approved of how she conformed to the prosperity he yearned for and appreciated the well-fed face that had experienced no pain or hardship. Above all, she exhibited the confidence his mother lacked, which, he supposed, was a large part of his initial attraction to her.
He briefly wondered what justice meant to her, a woman who surely had no need for it, let alone think of it?
“Mr. Royer was a very good man, Jude,” she spoke. “I found much to admire in him. It is an honor to have been his son.”
Jude gripped the shepherd.
“I wish I had the fortitude to speak against slavery as Mr. Royer did, and I admit I don’t because it would not suit Papa for me to become political.”
“I don’t want to talk about my father.”
“I understand, Jude,” she said.
Did she?
“There is something else, isn’t there?” she added. “When Papa pressed for news from Baltimore, you went quiet. You avoided his questions when you came last week, and you avoided them again today.”
He looked at Eliza in the mirror again. How could he explain his fears of a conspiracy surrounding Matthew Swann’s arrest without seeming like a lunatic, like Oscar? Or of how he’d almost been killed? What would she make of the old colored woman? His growing obsession with justice? His tormented fears over the dark fury that he’d denied all these years. Telling her would make his problems hers too, for it was how she saw the world.
And he almost did.
But he stopped. Raised in the ideals of Christian ladyhood and educated at convent schools, Eliza had never seen evil beyond as an abstract concept and could scarcely understand its existence in her sheltered world. To her, all people were essentially good, and all faults were simply misguided behavior.
His desires to confide disappeared to be replaced by a strenuous need to protect. He could never confess what he’d done to Martin Royer. Eliza must never, ever know that wickedness.
“No telegrams for me from Baltimore?” he asked, wondering how Matthew was doing. Eliza shook her head. No news from Ernst was good news, he hoped. But what George and Oscar said hurt more than he wanted to admit, and his father’s words still rankled. What did he stand for? Did he mistake concern for money with principles? Did the reserve meant to control his dark fury mean he was a coward?
And not….a nice person? That claim of George hurt most of all.
He settled on part of the truth and gave a brief overview of the riot and Matthew’s arrest.
Eliza clasped her hands into the lap of her dress. “It’s how you got the cut on your head? Poor Mr. Swann,” she said with genuine sympathy. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do? I’m just an attorney,” he mumbled.
“If you are this bothered, you must be assured of Mr. Swann’s innocence. I don’t think you are someone content to watch a man’s liberties taken away from him. It’s not just.”
He laughed.
When Eliza looked up in puzzlement, he said: “Justice! Everyone in America knows what justice is. We’re so proud of our so-called justice. We proclaim it from the rooftops. We boast to the world there’s nothing comparable to American liberty, freedom and justice. We’re arrogant about it. Prideful. Yet no one can define justice, at least to my satisfaction. My brothers’ views differ. Oscar sees justice as avenging wrongs at all costs, while George simply sees it as not doing anything wrong. The South screams for justice in defending the right to slave ownership. Perhaps the United States was founded on false premises and justice is nothing more than a figment of our imaginations.”
Eliza smiled at his outburst. “’Let us have faith that right makes might,’” she said.
He looked at her. The phrase was oddly familiar.
She shook her head. “It is not my saying. “It’s from Mr. Lincoln.”
“A politician,” Jude scoffed, resentful at the introduction of Abraham Lincoln into his conversation with his fiancé. “Galvanizing the masses to win a few votes.”
“Mr. Lincoln isn’t any politician, Jude.”
“No?” Jude said harshly. “I don’t need to know Mr. Lincoln. I already know these politicians. I’ve seen them all my life. I know the political rallies, raucous parades, banner waving, drunken brawls, torchlight marches and speeches filled with lewd jokes and personal attacks, all to win the favor of a gullible public who treats politics as little more than a spectator sideshow. They’re just as bad as these camp revivals led by crackpot circuit riders speaking in tongues. And what has happened? Disunion! There may even be a war! Oh, yes, I know this Mr. Lincoln. He, who single-handedly caused the Southern states to secede. Does he not take the most responsibility for our current predicament?”
Eliza rose and took his hands into hers. Her eyes rested on him with the comfortable assurance of a woman who knows a man better than he likes to admit.
“I know you pride yourself for avoiding politics. With silly Mr. Buchanan still in Washington, I understand your reluctance to be involved in political issues. You are such a calm and rational person and perhaps it was sensible in past years. Now times are changing, and rapidly so. Since you spoke of justice, I wonder if you have read any of Mr. Lincoln’s writings? I find him a fascinating man with astute observations on what men should do as regards our liberties and freedom, and yes, justice, and why it is important to America. Papa didn’t vote for him because he supported John Bell of the Constitutional Union party. But Mama is a staunch supporter of Mr. Lincoln, and if I could vote, I would have voted for Mr. Lincoln.”
“You and twenty-three hundred other Marylanders,” Jude pointed out.
“There are that many intelligent men in Maryland? Why, I am surprised,” she teasingly said. “During the campaigning for Mr. Lincoln, I started to read his speeches, to understand what made him a dangerous man in the minds of so many people. And I was astonished. Do you know what Mr. Lincoln said?”
Eliza went to a china cabinet and retrieved a pamphlet. “This is a speech Mr. Lincoln delivered at the Cooper Institute in New York City a year ago. I would read it if I were you, Jude.”
He glanced at the pamphlet with reluctance. “I need to catch the train back to Baltimore,” he reminded her.
“Jude, I do understand why you avoided Mr. Lincoln. You hated anything threatening the fragile peace between the North and South, which is admirable. But you will be astounded by what the new president has to say. It will change forever how you perceive America. More importantly, it will show you what rightly should be done. It has for me.”
Jude started to protest, and she interrupted him. “Read what Mr. Lincoln says. ‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty,’” she quoted, and tucked the pamphlet into Jude’s hand. “And I believe that is where you will find justice.”
Right makes might…
Martin Royer had said it, too, Jude now remembered.
“Read the speech on the train. Promise me! I find much in common between you and Abraham Lincoln, for you are both ambitious attorneys born to poor farm families. You chose to leave behind the simple world once ordained of you and have dared to face the challenges in wanting something greater. And in doing so you have become an even more valued member of society. I often wonder why some people should be more fortunate in life than others, and what that obliges of us. It’s now more important for you to take a greater role in protecting the freedom and liberties of America, especially the liberties of those who do not have your capabilities. And, yes, bringing justice to those who do not have it.”
Jude stared at Eliza.
“As you told Father earlier, trade is slow in Baltimore, so you must have spare time to solve the mystery behind Mr. Swann’s unjust arrest. It may be one small incident and hardly comparable to secessionism or the horrors of slavery, but it is a starting point.”
The gray fingers broke from their prison to meet across Jude’s brain, reaching in a point of pain pressing against his forehead, taunting him, sneering at his false pride and laughing at his fear of failure. For all her idealistic words, Eliza couldn’t understand how dangerous life in Baltimore could be, and what it meant to be a law-abiding citizen within the dangerous world of the secessionists.
Or was George right?
Had he hidden his real self from Eliza Angell? The truth that Jude Royer was not good but a selfish man who had a dark and even violent fury buried deep inside?
Suffocated between two worlds, Jude placed the shepherd back on the mantle. It bumped into a porcelain princess and fell onto the hearth. He looked hopelessly at the shards of broken white china agains the black marble. “Forgive me,” he mumbled.
“The damage is already done,” Eliza calmly said. “Papa never liked it, anyway. It should be the least of your worries and you should look to the future and not worry about what has already happened.”
Jude stared at his fiancé. What did she already know? Her words could mean one thing; then again, it could mean something else entirely.
He wanted to take her into his arms. He wanted to put his head on her shoulder and to cry in pain. He wanted to confess how he often felt alone, so very alone. And that he didn’t trust even himself. He wanted to whisper that he loved her and to hear Eliza forgive him and say that all would be well. And he almost did, before catching himself. Eliza was the wrong person to seek forgiveness.
Only one person could forgive him, and Jude knew that would never happen.
“You are such an admirable man, Jude, so strong and rigorous,” Eliza suddenly spoke. “I can see how my words must embarrass you. Papa is impressed by your abilities to never fear what needs to be done.”
She looked at him. “Find out what happened in Baltimore. Free Matthew Swann. If I am allowed the rights of a fiancé to set you forth on a mission to win my hand, let this be it.” She took his hands again and held them against her cheeks. She looked into his eyes and smiled, calm and demure. “You may not have a white stallion or a sword, but I have confidence in you, Mr. Royer.”
He almost swore.
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