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

"To do nothing except make yourself beautiful for a man . . . like your little placees. As if each of them
assumes that she's the favorite of the harim, and not some lowly odalisque who spends most of her day
polishing other women's toenails or washing other women's sheets. And the harim is of course always
that of a wealthy man, who can afford sorbets and oils and silken trousers instead of cheap
hand-me-downs that have to last you three years."

She shook her head, a Moroccan desert witch incompletely disguised as a French bonne femme. The
huge black eyes laughed in a face that shouldn't have been beautiful but was. "Like dreaming about living
in one of these castles up here, without having seen a castle, which look horribly uncomfortable to me.
And of course, the dreamer is always the queen."

Ayasha had left Algiers at the age of fourteen with a French soldier rather than go into the harim her
father had chosen for her. When January met her, even at eighteen she had risen from seamstress to
designer with a very small—but spotlessly clean—shop of her own, and had little time for the romantic
legends of the East.

But the sight of a woman with henna in her hair, the smell of sesame oil and honey, could still shake him
to his bones.

He could not believe that he would never see her again.

When he looked up at the conclusion of the Lancers, the sword master Augustus Mayerling stood beside
the piano.

"Monsieur Janvier?" He inclined his head, neat pale features overweighted by a hawk-beak nose and
marred from hairline to jawbone with saber scars. His eyes were a curious light hazel, like a wolf's. "I am
given to understand that you've practiced as a physician."

"I'm a surgeon, actually," said January. "I trained at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. After that I practiced there
for three years."
"Even better." The Prussian's fair hair was cropped like a soldier's; it made his head seem small and
birdlike above the flare of his Elizabethan ruff. Like Hannibal, he spoke with barely an accent, though
January guessed it came from good teaching rather than length of time spent in the United States.

"Bone and blood is a constant. I would prefer a man who understands them, rather than one who spent
six years at university learning to argue about whether purges raise or lower the humors of the human
constitution and how much mercury and red pepper will clarify a man's hypothetical bile. That imbecile
Bouille's challenged Granger to a duel," he added, evidently not considering a Paris-trained surgeon's
current position at the piano of a New Orleans ballroom a subject of either surprise or comment.
"Children, both of them."

The lines at the corners of his eyes marked Mayerling as older than he looked, but he was still probably
younger than either his student or the man that student had challenged. January didn't say anything, but
the lines deepened just slightly, ironically amused. "Well-paying children," admitted Mayerling, to
January's unspoken remark. "Nevertheless. Bouille's wife is the sister to two of the physicians in
town—physicians who actually studied medicine somewhere other than in their uncles' back offices, you
understand—and the third has money invested in Monsieur Granger's prospective LaFayette and
Pontchartrain railway company. The others who have been recommended to me seem overfond of
bleeding. ... I trust that your remedy for a bullet in the lung does not involve a cupping glass? It is to my
professional interest, you understand, to know things like this."