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

double circle of the waltzers, annoyed in a tired way—as Angelique annoyed him now—at the thought of
how she literally dropped everything to dance attendance on this man whose mother, sisters, female
cousins, and quite possibly fiancee were standing stiff-backed in a corner of the Theatre d'Orleans,
chatting with other deserted ladies and pretending they had no idea where their errant menfolk had got to
just now.

Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose deserved better.

Minou deserved better.

Didn't they all?

The ballroom was full, this waltz among the most popular of the repertoire. There were more men than
women present now, watching the dancers, talking, flirting a little with the unmarried girls under their
mamas' wary eyes. The costumes made a fiery rainbow, bright and strange, in the brilliant light, like the
enchanted armies of a dream. He could identify groups from the tableaux vivants, theme and design
repeated over and over, nymphs and coquettes of the ancien regime. Dreams for the men who owned
these women, or sought to own them; a chance to see their mistresses in fantasy glory. You don't love a
sang mele whose mother bargained with you for her services. You love Guenevere in her bower,
you love the Fairy Queen on Midsummer's Eve. For the young girls, the girls who were here to show
off their beauty to prospective protectors, the occasion was more important still.

No wonder Agnes Pellicot's face was stone when she hurried through the ballroom and then out again.
No wonder there was poison in her eyes as she watched Euphrasie Dreuze trip by, an overdressed,
overjeweled pink dove. Where January sat at the pianoforte he could look out through the triple doors of
the ballroom to the lobby and see men and women—clothed in dreams and harried by the weight of their
nondream lives—as they came and went.
Angelique's mother caught Peralta Pere as the elderly planter reentered the ballroom, asked him
something anxiously. The old man's white brows pulled together and his face grew grim. Telling him
about the quarrel, guessed January, and asking if he's seen either Galen or Angelique. The old
planter turned and left abruptly, pausing in the wide doorway to bow to a group of chattering young girls
who entered, clothed for a tableau as the Ladies of the Harim.

January returned his attention to the keys. That was one dream he preferred not to regard too near.

There were about six of them, mostly young girls— he didn't know their names. Minou had told him, of
course, but even after three months back he was still unfamiliar with the teeming cast of the colored
demimonde. Though he had never in his life seen Ayasha in anything but sensible calicos or the simple,
ivory-colored tarlatan that had been her one good dress—the dress in which they had buried her last
August—still the sight of the Arabian ladies tore at the unhealed flesh of his heart. From the waltz they
slid into another Lancers, almost without break. Dimly, the sounds of quarreling could be heard when the
curtain to the passageway was raised. The night was late enough for just about everybody to be drunk,
both on that side of the passageway and this. Still he didn't look up, seeking such nepenthe as the music
had to offer.

Maybe it was because Ayasha had laughed at the latest fad for things Arabic. "They think it's so
glamorous, the life of the harim," she had said, that lean, hooknosed face profiled in the splendor of the
cool Paris sun that poured through the windows of their parlor in the Rue de 1'Aube. Beadwork glittered
in her brown hands.