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

choice was based on the knowledge that there was precious little a woman could do to keep a roof over
her head and food on her table except sell herself to a man on the best terms she could get. Why starve
and scrimp and sell produce on the levee, why sew until your fingertips bled and your eyes wept with
fatigue, when you could dress in silk and spend the larger part of your days telling servants what to do
and having your hair fixed?
A girl has to live.

Then Angelique Crozat stepped into the ballroom, and January understood the iciness in his sister's voice.

True, a girl must live. And even the most beautiful and fair-skinned octoroon could not go long without
the wealth of a protector. That was the custom of the country.

And true, the social conventions that bound a white woman so stringently—to coyness and ignorance
before marriage, prudishness during, and hem-length sable veils for a year if she had the good fortune not
to die in childbed before her spouse—did not apply to the more sensual, and more rational, demimonde.

But it was another matter entirely to appear at a ball in the dazzling height of Paris fashion two months
after her lover was in his tomb.

Her gown was white-on-white figured silk, simply and exquisitely cut. Like Dominique's it swooped low
over the ripe splendor of her bosom and like Dominique's possessed a spreading wealth of sleeve that
offset the close fit of the bodice in layer after fairylike layer of starched lace.

But her face was covered to the lips in the tabbied mask of a smiling cat, and the great cloud of her black
hair, mixed with lappets of lace, random strands of jewels, swatches of red wigs, blond curls, and the
witchlike ashy-white of horsetails—poured down like a storm of chaos over her shoulders and to her tiny
waist. Fairy wings of whalebone and stiffened net, glittering with gems of glass and paste, framed body
and face, accentuating her every movement in a shining aureole. She seemed set apart, illuminated, not of
this world.

A triple strand of pearls circled her neck, huge baroques in settings of very old gold mingled with what
looked like raw emeralds, worked high against the creamy flesh. More strands of the barbaric necklace
lay on the upthrust breasts, and bracelets of the same design circled her wrists, and others yet starred the
primal ocean of her hair.

Fey, brazen, and utterly outrageous, it was not the costume of a woman who mourns the death of her
man.

The young man in gray left Clemence Drouet standing, without a word of excuse, and hastened toward
that glimmering flame of ice. He was scarcely alone, for men flocked around her, roaring with laughter at
her witticisms—"What, you on your way to a duel?" of an armored Ivanhoe, and to a Hercules, "You get
that lion skin off that fellow down in the lobby? Why, your majesty! You brought all six of your wives
and no headsman? How careless can you be? You may need that headsman!"

In spite of himself, January wanted her.

The young man in gray worked himself through the press toward her, holding out his hands. She saw him,
caught and held his gaze, and under the rim of the cat's whiskers the red lips curved in a welcoming smile.

Timing is everything. And quite deliberately, and with what January could see was rehearsal-perfect