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

"And let people say he ran away?" contradicted Jacques unbelievingly. "I say eleven."

"That's William Granger?" Like everyone else who'd been following the escalating war of letters in the
New Orleans Bee, January had pictured the railway speculator as, if not exactly a tobacco-spitting
Kaintuck savage, at least the sort of hustling American businessman who came to New Orleans on the
steamboats with shady credit and a pocket full of schemes to get rich quick.

That might, he supposed, be the result of the man's spelling, as demonstrated in his letters to the Bee's
editor, or the speed with which his accusations against the head of the city planning council had
degenerated from allegations of taking bribes and passing information to speculators in rival railway
schemes to imputations of private misconduct, dubious ancestry, and personal habits un-suited to a
gentleman, to say the least.

Not that Councilman Bouille's rebuttals had been any more dignified in tone, particularly after Granger
had accused him of not even speaking good French.

January shook his head, and slid into the bright measures of Le Pantalon. The crowd swirled,
coalesced, divided into double sets of couples in a rather elongated ring around the walls of the long
ballroom. Creole with Creole, American with American, foreign French with foreign French ....
Bonapartist with Bonapartist, for all he knew.

He saw the young Prussian fencing master emerge from the passageway to the other ballroom, the
offending newspaper tucked under one arm, and scan the crowd, like a scar-faced, beak-nosed heron in
Renaissance velvet and pearls. The purple pirate stepped through the curtain behind him and conferred
with him rapidly—a silk scarf covered the corsair's hair but nothing in the world could prevent his
copper-colored Vandyke from looking anything but awful in contrast. Then Mayerling moved off through
the crowd to speak with Granger, who had clearly brushed aside the encounter and was asking Agnes
Pellicot if one of her daughters would favor him with a dance.

Agnes looked him up and down with an eye that would have killed a snap bean crop overnight and made
excuses. January had heard his mother remark that her friend would have her work cut out for her to
successfully dispose of Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, Marie-Therese, and Marie-Niege, but Kaintucks were
Kaintucks.

Her own protector having crossed over to join his fiancee in the Theatre, Phlosine Seurat waved, and
Mayerling joined her in a set with a very young, fair, chinless boy in a twenty-dollar gray velvet coat.

The tide of the music drew January in—the "tour des mains," the "demi promenade," the "chaine
an-glaise"—and for a time it, and the joy of the dancers, was all that existed for him. Hidden within the
heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white
man who'd given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half
year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and
incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the
gentle hypnotism of the Rosary. With the gaslight flickering softly on the keys and the subliminal rus-de of
petticoats in his ears, he could almost believe himself in Paris again, and happy.

As a medical student he had played in the dance halls and the orchestras of theaters, to pay his rent and
buy food, and after he had given up the practice of medicine at the H6tel Dieu, music had been his living
and his life. It was one of his joys to watch the people at balls: the chaperones waving their fans on the
rows of olive-green velvet chairs, the young girls with their heads together giggling, the men talking