"Barbara Hambly - Libre" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

LIBRE
by Barbara Hambly

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Art by David Sullivan
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Barbara Hambly lived in New Orleans for three years with her late husband,
science fiction writer George Alec Effinger. The city provides the setting for
her crime fiction, the pre-Civil War Benjamin January series. What better
way to begin a journey through time and the New Orleans of mystery-writing
imagination than with a tale of January, former slave and sometime sleuth.
Ms. Hambly’s new novel is Renfield, Slave of Dracula.


“If they fear she has been kidnapped, why not call the City Guard?” Benjamin
January paused on the steps that led up to the gallery of the garçonnière, looking
down at his mother in the narrow yard. He’d just returned from teaching his first
piano class of the winter—new students, Americans, in the suburb of St. Mary
upriver—and had been hoping to get a few hours’ nap before he had to dress up
again and play for a subscription ball over on Rue Orleans. There was a saying
among the musicians of New Orleans, You can sleep during Lent—which wasn’t
entirely true because the holy season was dotted with “exceptions,” like
Washington’s Birthday balls—but the week or two after the first frost were always
the worst. He’d played for the opening of the French Opera House last night, and
had gone on to provide quadrilles and pantaleones at a ball at the townhouse of a
wealthy sugar planter. The sellers of fresh milk and crayfish had been beginning their
morning rounds when he’d finally returned to his room above his mother’s kitchen.

Afternoon coffee with his mother’s friends was not something he wanted to
deal with on three hours of sleep, particularly not when his mother had that glint in
her eye.

“The City Guard.” Livia Lev-esque sniffed. “You know what they are, my
son. If a slave disappears they’ll sober up and hunt for the thief because the owner
will give them a reward. If a libre disappears—” She used the Spanish term for their
people, the free people of color, though Louisiana hadn’t been a possession of
Spain for thirty years now. “—they have other things to do. You come downstairs
now, Ben. Poor Madame Rochier is nearly mad with fear and grief.”

That his mother was up to something—that there was something about the
disappearance of eighteen-year-old Marie-Zulieka Rochier that she wasn’t going to
admit in her first preemptory demand that he undertake the search—January guessed
from his mother’s tone, and the way she held her head. He was forty-one, and had
consciously noticed before the age of four—when she and he and his younger sister
Olympe had all still been slaves on a sugar plantation upriver—all the signs when she
was doctoring some unpalatable truth.

When he followed her into the dining room of the trim little cottage on Rue
Burgundy he was sure of it.