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

behind the Mozart dances that would usher in the Harim.

"Don't you dare!" cried a masked woman in a red-and-gold hashish dream of a Sultana costume. Her
fantasia of dyed ostrich plumes tossed like storm clouds as she shook her head and shed a faint snowfall
of shreds, "We're on last. It serves her right if she misses her place."

"Rachelle, of course if she shows up after you go on, we'll put her on last," said Minou coaxingly. "Think
how unfair it would be to punish Emilie and Clemence and the two Maries. And where is Clemence?"

"I think she left when Galen did," put in Marie-Rose. "Iphegenie's aunt saw someone wearing that
gray-green dress in the courtyard."

"Tell you what," said January, as the Sultana Rachelle's bronze mouth puckered dangerously. "We'll do
that mazurka as an extra, to give everybody a little more time. Minou, you checked back on the parlor
lately? She's got to go back there one time or another if she's going to fix those wings of hers. It's the only
place where she'd have room to work."

"Hussy," whispered Agnes Pellicot, her face like a hurricane sky. "Bandeuse! Coming to the ball like this,
two months or less after Arnaud Trepagier is in his tomb, to see what else she can catch! If she'd had any
decency she would have left the tableau, turned her position in it over to someone else! She can't be
needing money. After all he gave her, the jewels he lavished on her, slaves, a house fit for royalty, horses
and a carriage, even! You saw those pearls and emeralds she had about her neck! He'd ride in from his
plantation every night to be with her, even took her to the opera . . . fie!"

She stormed out into the lobby again in wrath.

"Dare one infer," murmured Hannibal, turning over a page of the mazurka, "that Mama had some plans
for Peralta Fils and the fair Marie-Rose?"

"Sounds like it," agreed January philosophically. "Shall we?"

The brisk dance was entering its third variation when Minou reappeared in the hall, her face ashy in the
dark frame of her hair. January, glancing up from the piano, saw the flutter of her sleeves with the shaky
wave of her hands, the way the jeweled pomander chain at her waist vibrated with the trembling of her
knees. With a quick gesture he signaled Hannibal to carry the figure as a solo —hoping his colleague
wasn't going to engage in any adventures with the tempo, as he sometimes did at this stage of an
evening—and leaned from the piano's seat.

"What is it?"
"I . . ." Minou swallowed hard. "You'd better come."

"What happened?" He hadn't known his sister long, but he knew that under the empty-headed frivolity
lay considerable strength of mind. It was the first time he'd ever seen her unnerved.

"In the parlor," she said. "Ben, I think she's dead."

FOUR
From the time he was fourteen years old, January had wanted to study medicine.

St.Denis Janvier had sent him to one of the very fine schools available to the children of the colored