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

Music drifted from the pale, pillared bulk of the Theatre d'Orleans immediately to his right, and a mingled
chatter of talk through the carriageway to the courtyard of the Salle d'Orleans that had been his goal. The
long windows of both buildings were open, despite the evening's wintry cool—not that New Orleans
winters ever got much colder than a Normandy spring. That was something he'd missed, all these past
sixteen years.

In the Theatre, the Children's Ball would just be finishing, the main subscription ball getting ready to
begin. The restless, fairy radiance of the newfangled gaslights falling through the windows and the warmer
amber of the oil lamps on their chains above the intersection of the Rue Ste.-Ann and Rue Royale,
showed him proud, careful mamas clothed as classical goddesses or Circassian maids, and watchful
papas in the incongruous garb of pirates, lions, and clowns, escorting gorgeously costumed little boys and
girls to the carriages that awaited them, drawn up just the other side of the gurgling gutters and tying up
traffic for streets. With the Theatre's long windows open he could hear the orchestra playing a final
country dance—"Catch Fleeting Pleasures"—and he could identify whom they'd got to play: That had to
be Alcee Boisseau on the violin and only Philippe Decoudreau could be that hapless on the cornet.

January winced as he picked up his music satchel from beside the wall where he'd dropped it in his
excess of knight-errantry, wiped a trace of blood from his lip and thought, Let's not do that again. The
Mohican Princess was long gone, and January hoped, as he made his way toward the lights and voices of
the courtyard that lay behind the Salle d'Orleans' gambling rooms, that Richelieu had gone into the
gambling rooms or upstairs to the Salle as well. The colored glimmer of light from the courtyard, slanting
into the dark of the passageway, showed him a couple of green-black cock feathers from the woman's
headdress lying on the bricks at his feet
The woman had called his name. She had been scared.

Why scared?

To any woman who would come unaccompanied to the Blue Ribbon Ball at the Salle d'Orleans, being
thrown up against the wall and kissed by a white man was presumably the point of the evening.

So why had she cried out to him in fear?

Colored lanterns jeweled the trees in the court, and the gallery that stretched the length of the Salle's rear
wall. In the variegated light, Henry VIII and at least four of his wives leaned over the gallery's wooden
railings, laughing amongst themselves and calling down in English to friends in the court below. January
didn't have to hear the language to know the Tudor monarch was being impersonated by an American.
No Creole would have had the poor taste to appear with more than one woman on his arm. A curious
piece of hypocrisy, January reflected wryly, considering how many of the men at the Blue Ribbon Ball
tonight had left wives at home; considering how many more had escorted those wives, along with sisters,
mothers, and the usual Creole regiments of cousins, to the subscription ball in the Theatre, directly next
door.

Both the Salle d'Orleans and the Theatre were owned by one man—Monsieur Davis, who also owned a
couple of gambling establishments farther along Rue Royale—and were joined by a discreet passageway.
Most of those gentlemen at the subscription ball tonight would slip along that corridor at the earliest
possible moment to meet their mulatto or quadroon or octoroon mistresses. That was what the Blue
Ribbon Balls were all about.

Ayasha, he recalled, had hardly been able to credit it when he'd recounted that aspect of New Orleans
life. None of the ladies in Paris had. "You mean they attend balls on the same night, with their wives in