"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man of Color" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

As he settled at the piano—a seven-octave Erard, thick with gilt and imported at staggering cost from
Paris —and removed his hat and gloves, January thought he caught a glimpse of the creamy buff of a
buckskin gown in the far doorway. He swung around, distracted, but the shifting mosaic of revelers hid
whoever it was he thought he'd seen.

Concern flared in him, and anger, too. Damn it, girl, I'm trying to keep you from ruining yourself His
hands passed across the keys, warming up; then he nodded to Hannibal and to Uncle Bichet, and like
acrobats they bounded into the bright strains of the Marlboro Cotillion. First thoughts were best—I'm
getting too old to be a knight-errant. His lip smarted and he cringed inwardly at the thought of seeking
out and interviewing Angelique Crozat later in the evening.

And for what? So that she could come up here anyway . . .

But why would she come up? He'd seen her relax at the thought that she didn't have to find the woman
herself, saw the dread leave her.

He'd probably been mistaken. He hoped he'd been mistaken. Men were leading their ladies in from the
lobby, forming up squares. Others came filtering through the discreetly curtained arch that led to the
passageway from the Theatre next door, greeting their mistresses with kisses, their men friends with
handshakes and grins of complicity, while their wives and fiancees and mothers no doubt fanned
themselves and wondered loudly where their menfolk could have got to. The custom of the country.
January shook his head.

All of Madeleine Trepagier's family, and her deceased husband's, were probably at that ball. He'd never
met a Creole lady yet who didn't have brothers and male cousins. True, if they didn't know she'd be here
they wouldn't be expecting to see her, but there was always the risk. With luck the first dances—cotillion,
waltz, Pantalon— would absorb their attention, giving the woman time to make her escape.

If that was what she was going to do. The skipping rhythms of the cotillion drew at his mind. He knew
that for the next hour, music would be all he'd have time to think about. Whatever she decided to do,
she'd be on her own.

It was her own business, of course, but he had been fond of her as a child, the genius and the need of her
soul calling to the hunger in his. She had to be desperate in the first place to come here. Quiet and
well-mannered and genuinely considerate as she had been as a child, she had had the courage that could
turn reckless if driven to the wall. He wished heartily that he'd had time to escort her back to the
Trepagier town house himself.

He was to wish it again, profoundly, after they discovered the body in the parlor at the end of the hall.

TWO
Benjamin January's first public performance on the piano had been at a quadroon ball. He was sixteen
and had played for the private parties and dances given during Christmas and Carnival season by
St.Denis Janvier for years; he was enormously tall even then, gawky, lanky, odd-looking, and painfully
shy. St.Denis Janvier had hired for him the best music master in New Orleans as soon as he'd
purchased—and freed—his mother.

The music master was an Austrian who referred to Beethoven as "that self-indulgent lunatic" and
regarded opera as being on intellectual par with the work hollers Ben had learned in his first eight years in
the cane fields of Bellefleur Plantation where the growing American suburb of Saint Mary now stood.