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

stylishly in a damson-colored cutaway coat, jade-green waistcoat, and pale pantaloons, and resembled
nothing so much as a colossal plum. When the waltz was over Dominique fluttered across the dance floor
to the musicians' stand, holding out one lace-mitted hand, a beautiful amber-colored girl with velvety eyes
and features like an Egyptian cat's.

"First I heard Queen Guenevere had her dresses made from La Belle Assemblee." Benjamin gestured to
the fashionable bell-shaped skirt, the flounced snowbank of white lace collar, and the sleeves puffed
out—Dominique had recently assured him—on hidden frameworks of whalebone and swansdown. Like
every woman of color in New Orleans she was required to wear a tignon—a head scarf—in public, and
had used the license granted by a masked ball to justify a marvelous confection of white and rose plumes,
of wired and pomaded braids, of stiffened lace dangling with tasseled lappets of rose point in every
direction, the furthest thing from the grace of Camelot that could be imagined.

Women these days, January had concluded, wore the damnedest things.

"Queen Guenevere is for the tableaux vivants, silly. And I'm just appallingly late as it is—you can't get
any kind of speed out of waiters during Carnival, even in a private dining room—and I've just found out
Iphegenie Picard doesn't have her costume for our tableau finished! Not," she added crisply, "that she's
alone in that. Iphegenie was telling me—"

"Is Angelique Crozat here?" In the three months he'd been back in New Orleans, January had learned
that the only way to carry on a conversation with Dominique was to interrupt mercilessly the moment the
current appeared to be carrying her in a direction other than the one intended.

She said nothing for a moment, but the full lips beneath the rim of the mask tightened slightly, and the chill
was as if she'd imported a chunk of New England ice to cool the air between them. "Why on earth do
you want to talk to Angelique, p'tit? Which I wouldn't advise, by the way. Old man Peralta has been
negotiating with Angelique's mama—for his son, you know, the one who doesn't have a chin—and the
boy's crazy with jealousy if any other man so much as looks at her. Augustus Mayerling's had to pull him
out of two duels over her already, which he hasn't any right to be getting into— Galen, I mean—because
of course negotiations are hardly begun . . ."

"I need to give her a message from a friend," said January mildly.

"Better write it on the back of a bank draft if you want her to read it," remarked Hannibal, coming around
to lean on the corner of the piano. "In simple words of one syllable. You ever had a conversation with the
woman? Very Shakespearean."

Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique's hat and twisted his own long hair into a
knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. "Full of sound
and fury but signifying nothing." Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never
would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin
and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.

"I haven't had the pleasure," said January wryly. "Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black
African nigger when she was six. But I've heard conversations she's had with others."

"I've done that two streets away."
"She'll be here." Dominique's tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes
a hurricane. "And I don't think you'll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can't do