"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 07 - Days of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Anglo-Irish, overlaid with the whispery hoarseness of consumption.

"Or do you think you'll find someone that you've lost in those waters?"

With cholera walking the dark streets of every city in the world that year, it was a reasonable question.
January saw again what was, at that time, his last clear recollection before the long haze of grief and
agony in which he'd taken ship for New Orleans from Paris-his wife Ayasha's body, stretched across
their bed in their grilling-hot room in Paris, her long black hair trailing down into the drying pools of vomit
on the floor. The disease had spared her nothing. She had suffered and died alone.

"Not think," he'd replied, the whole conversation with this slight fantastic figure feeling to him like
something from a dream. As the past two months, since finding Ayasha’s body, had all felt like a dream.
"Hope."

"Hope is something the living do." The fiddler coughed, switching the bow into his other hand so that he
could press his hand to his side. ". . . to hope til Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it
contemplates. . . . It's too silly an occupation for the dead."
 January took a sip of the gin-which was cheap and unspeakably bad-and said, "You may be right
about that."

000

The diligencia jolted, bringing him back to the present. To the knowledge of money in his pocket, and
Rose-whom he had not known existed on that hot storm-whispering night three years ago-at his side.

Slowly he said, "Hannibal has been my friend for three years. Drunk or sober, I don't think you could
find a more peaceable soul in creation-or a more hapless one." He spoke French-across from him the
two German mer-chants muttered together in their native tongue and glanced worriedly out at the gray
and yellow landscape of stone, distant pines, and dust. The entire journey had been a series of
translations and recapitulations, and even in the close confines of the swaying coach January and Rose
had a curious sense of privacy, as if everyone else were trapped within their own linguistic worlds.

"But it is also true," he went on, "that I have no idea what Hannibal did, or even what his name was,
before the night I met him." The morning after that encounter on the waterfront January had gotten his first
music pupil in New Orleans, and two nights after that had been hired for his first job playing at a
quadroon ball. Hannibal had been playing as well, as usual the only white among musicians who ranged
from musterfinos-men who were considered to be "of color" on the grounds of one African
great--grandparent-down to January's nearly-pure African blackness. For this reason alone the fiddler
was considered rather degenerate by the whites in the town.

"No," said Rose softly. "No ... He's never spoken of his family, or where he comes from, not even
when he's drunk."

January nodded-Hannibal had never mentioned what he was doing in the deserted darkness of the
New Orleans levee, contemplating the River Styx.

"Oh, he'll mention that he was up at Oxford, and his speech gets very Irish when he's drunk. He turned
up in New Orleans about a year before you did; he'd teach the girls at my school to play violin, piano,
and harp, and would correct their Latin in exchange for supper. I couldn't pay him in cash, of course."