Chapter 2

Summoning to a Quest

Saturday, January 19, 1861

His first name was Jude.

Jude Royer was never able to get used to it. It was not a sensible James or John. The four letters sounded unfinished, neither here nor there, and too similar to Judas, as school bullies and his brothers never let him forget. It invited inquisitive glances. A daily reminder he was of this world but not quite part of it.

It even seemed to separate him from his family, whose suspicions of his ambitions only redoubled his determination to pursue an education and find success away from the farm he grew up on.

As a result, he soon became adept at ignoring what he did not want to see or hear, so he almost missed the knock.

Irritated, Jude finally looked up from the foolscap on which he was drafting a boundary dispute petition brief against Baltimore’s richest citizen and went to the door.

The colored woman was not pretty.

Cracked leathery skin stretched over her bones and sores dotted the gnarled hands. A quilt enveloped the gaunt body and a faded red turban covered her skeletal head.

But it was her her odor that nearly knocked him over.

“Mistah Royer?”

“I am he,” Jude muttered, stifling his nostrils.

“Mistah Royer,” she spoke again. “I’s been sent to you.”

She wouldn’t be the first visitor, black or white, begging to scrub floors or cuspidors for pennies. “I’m sorry I have nothing for you,” he said, hoping she’d leave.

He did not lack sympathy, but he resented any intrusions into a life he went to great efforts to keep as orderly as possible. And the brief was due at the courthouse on Monument Square later that afternoon.

The colored woman seemed stoic enough when Jude contemplated how Abraham Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s temper tantrum had thrown a wrench into the booming American economy.

In these final days of the inept Buchanan administration, Northern states remained in paralysis while Southern states stampeded from the Union and seized Federal forts and arsenals. With the clock ticking closer to Lincoln’s inauguration in March, trade in Baltimore harbor was slowing to a trickle with banks calling in loans, stores seeing fewer customers and the ranks of unemployed laborers swelling as people waited to see what would happen with the paranoia that had swept a wintry America.

Jude Royer firmly despised slavery but he also resented how the sudden dangers of disunion now threatened his plans for his fledging law practice and to buy the house he needed to marry his fiancé.

And, as much as he wanted to blame Lincoln for the crisis, he conceded it really was, in the words of a fellow resident at his lodgings, all because of the damned coloreds, the most despised people in America.

Pity overrode him.

“Wait! Get yourself a bowl of soup,” he said, pressing a nickel into the woman’s palm.

She recoiled. “I ain’t come for work. It ain’t be my business these days, praise the Lord! But I needs your help. There gonna be trouble if we do nothing. Big trouble.”

Jude stopped. Help?

He looked closely at her.

The face yielded nothing, nor was it distraught like a pleading client. Few colored people could afford an attorney. Besides, he specialized in commercial law and where did colored people come into it?

Except to be bought and sold, he bitterly observed, but this one was probably a freewoman. 25,000 free coloreds lived in Baltimore out of a population of more than 200,000, far exceeding the two thousand slaves still extant in the city.

Jude was about to send the woman away when his reflection shifted in the pier mirror in the hall.

In the light filtering through the dusty window on the landing, he saw his face, decades older, staring back.

He flinched.

Jude Royer wanted to believe he was not complicated. He wanted to think he approached life no differently than most men. He wanted to laugh at superstitions.

But he knew it was not true. He did not dwell on matters of faith, but he’d been instructed in the entirety of his life that God watched over everyone and to pass up an opportunity for charity only invited retribution on Judgement Day, when he would face eternal justice.

Then since one fateful day in his childhood he’d never been able to shake off the suspicion there were indeed consequences for every act he committed, whether great or small. What some people called bad luck, he speculated it was God’s punishment. Since then he’d been careful to never do anything wrong, but today he wondered if it didn’t mean he was doing the right thing either.

Well. At least he could hear out the woman and she looked as if she could sit down.

And her pleadings intrigued him. What could she want from him, out of all the lawyers in Baltimore?

“Do come in,” he said. She followed him, wheezing as she settled in a chair by his desk.

“I daresay you aren’t here to tell me how much trouble Mr. Lincoln is in,” he affably commented. “What is your story?”

She stared at him.                          

“Your name?” Jude asked, sitting opposite her.

The stare continued, her eyes searching him, studying his face, as if deciding if he could be trusted.

She was more weatherworn than the hucksters and peddlers walking the city streets but he had an unnerving notion she could even sense his thoughts tucked deep inside where no one should be able to see them.

And the damn smell continued to taunt him.

“Well?” he snapped, feeling offended and the sense of doing her a favor fading. “You do have a name?”

She seemed to come to a decision. “It ain’t matter what my name be,” she said. “I’s sorry to trouble you when you be busy. But this be important.”

“Family matters?”

She hesitated. “Least not what you’d call family. But it’s someone you knows. You got to promise me you’ll help perteck him.”

“Protect who?”

“Mistah Matthew Swann.”

Jude sat back so quickly at the unexpected name that the chair almost tipped over.

Matthew Swann rented the office next to his and they shared the downstairs clerk. He had reasons for not liking his fellow lawyer who, for all his amiability, was a secessionist sympathizer fancying the South the recreation of Sir Walter Scott’s imaginary world of knights and ladies.

And prone to hysterical stories of conspiracies by the North to suppress the South under the heels of tyranny.

And unquestionably an idiot.

“What has Mr. Swann done?” Jude resignedly said.

The red turban shook. “Nothing. It be the problem, Mr. Royer. I come for people speak of yo’ skills in the ways of the law. And you root hard, like a ferret, to fix a problem. That much I hear of you.”

The flattery left Jude suspicious.

“What has Mr. Swann done?” he repeated. “Don’t hide the truth.”

She grabbed his hands, dropping a piece of paper she’d been clenching in her palm. Shocked, he started to pull back, but her grip hardened.

“Something bad gonter happen.”

“What?”

Her smell seemed to dance, weaving in and out of Jude’s senses, taunting him even more fiercely than her eyes.

“If I were to tell you the devil hisself is in Baltimore, would you believe me? So I ain’t,” she started to say.

“But you just did.”

She stared at him.

“Never mind,” he hurriedly said.

“There’s men,” she said. “Iffin I tells you names, you be laughin’. But they be mighty, like Pharaoh in dem Bible. And they aimin’ to hurt Mistah Matthew. They don’t care ‘bout Mistah Matthew but they gonter use him to get what they want. And Mistah Matthew don’t know this.”

Jude raised an eyebrow, feeling his hands sweat in hers.

“Your story is unusual. Mr. Swann is a harmless man,” he said politely. “Many people respect him,” he added, blatantly lying. “What is this….plot…with Mr. Swann?”

“I can’t tell you neither for you ain’t believe me,” she whispered. “I knows it gonter be bad. Not just for Mistah Matthew but for folk like me, and even you, too. If they gets their way, there ain’t ever be justice. That’s why you got to help.”

Justice?

He jerked back, as if he’d been splashed with cold water.  

“A secessionist scheme?” Jude slowly asked, recalling wild rumors of men plotting to stop the Electoral College from ratifying November’s vote.

Judging from the Baltimore papers, most of the city hated Lincoln, with both secessionists and unionists holding him responsible for ripping apart the Union with his anti-slavery stance.

If the bullying language of Southern politicians and the Baltimore papers were to be believed, scores, even hundreds, of secret societies were plotting to push Maryland into secession.

No wonder that colored people should be jittery.

But as a southern sympathizer, why would Matthew be in danger? And why should a colored woman care for him?

And where did justice even begin to come into this god almighty mess America had found herself in?

Jude shifted. “Why not go to the police if you think Mr. Swann is in danger?”

She pinched the back of her hand and stretched the skin as thin as she could. “You see this, Mistah Royer? Black. Like them coals you ain’t got in yo’ stove though this be the coldest day o’ the year. What police gonter listen to an old colored woman?”

“Perhaps if I go to the police?” he suggested, despite knowing the implausibility with no evidence other than the ranting of a malnourished woman. And colored people were forbidden by law from testifying in Maryland courts.

“No! You can’t go to them police. They ain’t gonter listen to you either. They’s in the police too.”

“They’s?”

“Them! Them men who gonter hurt Mistah Matthew if you ain't save him.”

She frowned, and then spoke again. “Mistah Royer, you ever see a spider building a web? All them sticky white threads, getting bigger and bigger? And the spider hisself, waiting for the black fly? That’s them men. They got their web across Baltimore, even all o’ America, and they be waiting for Mistah Matthew. Then after Mistah Matthew they be waiting for….”

She trailed off.

Jude was no more inclined to believe this strange tale. Spiders and flies! “You still haven’t told me how you know of this plot. How do you even know Mr. Swann?” He went to the door, hoping the move would hint at his disbelief.

“It be neither here nor there,” she said, almost inaudible. “All that matter is something terrible gonter happen to Mistah Matthew. Keep him indoors. Make him leave Baltimore. He got family down in Virginny. Then maybe he don’t get caught in the web and all this don’t happen.”

 “Mr. Swann is in danger and you still won’t tell me why or how. As such I can infer you are withholding information. So why should I believe your story?”

He turned the knob.

“I knows who your pa is,” the woman quietly said.

Jude stopped. “How is it relevant?” he asked in a distant voice. “Especially to someone like Mr. Swann?”

“I knows you don’t like Mistah Matthew.”

“You know a lot, don’t you?” Jude harshly said at the sight of her placid face looking too knowingly at him.

“I knows you be a good man. I knows you must believe in justice.”

****

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