Saturday, January 19, 1861
The explosive riot swallowed the landau. Miss Victoria Harwood, daughter of Judge Teackle Warfield Harwood, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Baltimore and reckoned the most beautiful belle of Baltimore society, realized she was trapped.
From inside the carriage, she watched a beefy man swing at another rowdie while a third crashed into him, and the trio fell to be engulfed by a swell moving like the Atlantic, dirty, frothy and to and fro but never fully retreating.
“We best be goin’, Miss Victoria,” the Negro coachman shouted from the driver’s box. “This ain’t good!”
“Father will be upset if the carriage isn’t waiting for him,” she said, so horrified by what she saw that she quivered with excitement at not knowing what was to happen, a sentiment that doubly horrified her too.
“Your Papa ain’t gonna like it if he done know I brought you down here, Miss Victoria. Monument Square ain’t no place for a lady. Not these days. Your Papa be furious!”
She heard the panic in his voice. He seemed more afraid of the judge. She took out a half-dollar coin from her purse tucked in her muff. Not a bribe to stay, for the coachman couldn’t move. Despite what he urged, too many rioters filled the streets and the hacks outside the hotels blocked their path.
But she had other reasons. Money bought time. Money bought silence.
Money bought secrecy.
His eyes were hungry for the coin and he nodded. “Draw them curtains, Miss Victoria. Don’t let folk see you. It gonna get ugly afore it gets better….” he managed to say before the horses cut him off, jerking the landau as they writhed in their harnesses.
Never trust horses, her father the judge once warned her. Not even their dainty grays. He’d explained humans were bad enough for they only had two legs to think about, while horses’ brains were barely controllable madness with four powerful legs and four iron hooves. People died when horses bolted and upturned carriages. Or trampled men.
A good coachman was worth every penny if he had the ability to sense the fury and calm the horse. The judge would say that for his own father had been killed in being thrown from a horse while fox hunting.
The coachman did clamber off the box with the carriage blanket. He wrapped the blanket over the mare’s forehead. Her blinkers wouldn’t be enough in a riot like this. Her father claimed while horses could sense panic, they were easier to control if they couldn’t see the turmoil.
But the coachman couldn’t calm both horses at once. He might be a big man, but the horses were even bigger.
Something solid bounced off the landau.
Victoria’s heart started to race.
She could not call it fear for she’d never been afraid in her life.
But she could call it extreme unease and she wondered if she should abandon the landau for the nearest hotel.
The coachman couldn’t leave the horses and it’d mean trying to dart alone through the riot and the sheer mass of men formed a wall as solid as the granite of the courthouse foundations. Her crinoline would get tangled in someone’s feet.
She was sensible enough to recognize this was the one place where men wouldn’t defer to her, the daughter of Baltimore’s most prominent judge.
Especially not these men, loud and excitable enough on an ordinary day, even then they already seemed alien to her. Not quite human; short and ill-formed, hollowed cheeks from missing teeth, sallow from the peculiar combination of malnutrition and liquor, and myriad scars covering the jaws and foreheads. More pitiable than the dirty alley cats.
Did the rowdies look that different too when they were suckling babes, born a different species from the gentlemen of her society?
The judge sneered at these men from his bench, calling them yobs and mocking their alcoholism and stupidity.
Her mother, more contemptuous of the poor in her indifference, rarely spoke of them and only delicately arched her eyebrows in warning: these are not our kind of people, they are not gentlemen, they are not trustworthy, and for good reasons, which included fears of situations where a lady had no control or safety.
Victoria gasped as blood erupted across a face. She could take no more and fumbled with the curtain cords when to her astonishment Matthew Swann burst from the riot.
“Matthew!” she banged at the window.
Then Matthew stumbled, revealing the pale face of a man who must have pushed him to safety. Matthew brushed aside the coachman in his flight to safety, while his savior collapsed to be swallowed by the mob.
Firecrackers went off.
The horses reared and she slipped off the seat.
She hid on the floor, her heart beating heavily, her dress and heavy wool cape cocooned around her in case the landau should topple over, although she knew it wouldn’t make a difference.
After what felt like an eternity, the horses stabilized, and the landau stopped rocking.
Choking, Victoria hauled herself onto the seat. She peered through the window, wondering what had happened to the man who’d rescued Matthew, but was sickened by the sight of fighting bodies stampeding on fallen legs and chests and faces.
Then the swell dipped enough to reveal Matthew’s savior by the Battle Monument. She watched as he darted into the void made by the retreating mob and made it almost as far as the landau. She recognized the miscalculation before he did, for the fighting tide swung back towards him.
Victoria would never forget the moment when she flung open the door. The hungry leers of the rowdies lingered in her memories for years to come. She had the barest recollection of the coachman screaming and nothing of when she must have pulled the veil to hide her face from the mob.
All these details remained vague elements surrounding the memory of bracing herself against the doorframe and grabbing Matthew’s savior, hauling him into the carriage.
She was not a strong woman so she gasped, fighting to recover her breath and she felt flushed. Sweat dripped down her armpits, reminding her she’d forgotten to put pads there.
The man collapsed across the seat. He managed to grip the upholstery and pull himself upright. He fingered his skull.
The cut, which seemed so small from a distance, loomed large and bled.
“You are well?” she feebly asked, still shocked at what she’d done.
He winced.
His closed eyes invited her to look more closely.
He was not handsome as she defined the term. His cheeks were too high and eyes too inset, his nose too long and the lines on his face were too sharply defined and failed to be rescued by any vibrancy; he looked like something carved out of a block of wood and sanded into humanity.
Indeed, there was a grimness in his appearance she didn’t know what to make of and she suspected it wasn’t just because of the pain.
His clothes were respectable if not the best quality. The scarf was hand knitted. His tall collar hinted at fraying and was so starched it threatened to cut his jaws.
The black silk necktie, tugged loose in the turmoil, was of high quality, finer than the rest of his clothes.
A gift from a woman, she decided, and without knowing why, she felt jealous.
Despite the smears of horse droppings on his gloves and the broadcloth frock coat, she still smelled the soap and almost laughed. He was not only clean but scrubbed.
Even his dark blond, almost brownish, hair was smoothed although he did not use the shiny pomade many men used. He had no facial hair, an oddity for young men these days, but there was no softness about him either and she decided what she’d thought of as grimness was nothing more than determination.
She also decided this man would not tell a lie.
And something about his presence made her feel safer in a way she couldn’t explain.
“Thank you,” Victoria said.
His eyelids didn’t move more than a crack before he winced again. He squeezed them shut again.
“For saving Mr. Swann,” she added.
The fall to the cobblestones must have hurt more than a cut. No doubt he had a headache. A concussion too? He did look like someone in a state of shock and pity came across her.
“Mr. Swann is a childhood friend,” she added. “I saw you push him to safety. You were almost killed.”
He fingered the cut on his forehead again. He murmured something inaudible.
“I’m sorry?”
His face lifted as to look at her, yet his eyes remained shut. “Did you see him… who is he…”
But his body tensed, and he managed, against all odds, to squeeze himself into a smaller and stiffer person. His face hardened even more, as if determined to block his pain.
“Do you mean Mr. Swann? I believe he made it to safety.”
The man shook his head. “Another man. Who saved me. One of the rioters.”
“One of the rioters?” she said, surprised. “I daresay good people do come in all forms and shapes after all.”
“As do bad people,” he said.
Victoria was silenced.
His eyes remained closed. “How is it?” he asked, his voice dry.
“The cut?” She shook her head. “It seems to have stopped bleeding. It’s best to leave it alone although you must wash it as soon as you can.”
She wanted to wipe away the dried blood, but the act would be too intimate, and she realized this was the first time she was alone with a strange man, and in the scandalous confinements of a closed carriage! What would her parents say? Or the gossiping matrons of Baltimore’s polite society who critiqued any flaws in the virtues of their unmarried daughters with terrible brutality?
He suddenly inched up. “I must go to the courthouse! I’ve never been late. Ever!”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Victoria advised him, wanting to laugh at his concern. “I can give you a lift somewhere? I think enough of the riot has dispersed.”
He shook his head. “I have to deliver a brief.”
Ah, a lawyer.
She’d already sensed intelligence in him. Not smartness, which many people had, but the much rarer intelligence, and she inferred it from his determination not to succumb to paranoia. What happened had already happened and he seemed resolved to move on with his life.
“My father is a judge,” she told him. “The briefings are always late no matter how hard he tries to stick to a schedule.”
The injured man shook his head again. “Thank you, madam, for your assistance. I must not trouble you any further. I assure you I am much recovered. I would be obliged if you could drop me off by the courthouse.”
Well, there was that. Victoria had no reason to keep him bound to the landau and the vain stupidity of her society would turn their few minutes together into the scandal of the year.
“We will go around the corner to Charles Street. The crowd should be smaller up there and you can enter the courthouse from the rear,” she said.
He said nothing and continued to sit stiffly; his hand pressed against the wound. He was avoiding looking at her and she was both amused and flattered by his propriety.
The horses came to a stop as the crowd blocked their slow progress. A growing fascination and the realization their time together was too brief prompted her to ask: “What caused the riot?”
His eyebrow rose.
“Justice,” he finally said.
****
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