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

one building and another with their mistresses a hundred feet away?quot;

And January, too, had laughed, seeing the absurdity of it from the vantage point of knowing he'd never go
back again. There was laughter in most of his memories of Paris. "It's the custom of the country," he'd
explained, which of course explained nothing, but he felt an obscure obligation to defend the city of his
birth. "It is how it is."

Allowing a white man to strike him without raising a hand in his own defense was the custom of the
country as well, but of that, he had never spoken.

Why would she struggle? And who was she, that she'd known his name?

He paused beneath the gallery, his hand on the latch of the inconspicuous service door that led to offices,
kitchen, and service stair, scanning the court behind him for sight of that deerskin dress, that silly
feathered headdress that more resembled a crow in a fit than anything he'd actually seen on the Choctaws
or Natchays who came downriver to peddle file or pots in the market.

Most of the women who came to the quadroon balls came with friends, the young girls chaperoned by
their mothers. Women did come alone, and a great deal of outrageous flirting went on, but those who
came alone knew the rules.

Above him, one of Henry VIII's wives trilled with laughter and threw a rose down to a tobacco-chewing
Pierrot in the court below. The gaudy masks of the wives set off their clouds of velvety curls, chins and
throats and bosoms ranging from palest ivory through smooth cafe-au-lait. In London, January had seen
portraits of all the Tudor queens and, complexion aside, none of the originals had been without a
headdress. But this was one of the few occasions upon which, licensed by the anonymity of masks, a free
woman of color could appear in public with her hair uncovered, and every woman present was taking full
and extravagant advantage of the fact.

The French doors beneath the gallery stood open. Gaslights were a new thing—when January had left in
1817 everything had been candlelit—and in the uneasy brilliance couples moved through the lower lobby
and up the curving double flight of the main stair to the ballroom on the floor above. As a child January
had been fascinated by this festival of masks, and years had not eroded its eerie charm; he felt as if he
had stepped through into a dream of Shelley or Coleridge where everything was more vivid, more
beautiful, soaked in a crystalline radiance, as if the walls of space and time, fact and fiction, had been
softened, to admit those who had never existed, or who were no more.

Marie Antoinette strolled by, a good copy of the Le Brun portrait January had seen in the Musee du
Louvre, albeit the French queen had darkened considerably from the red-haired Austrian original.
January recognized her fairylike thinness and the way she laughed: Phlosine Seurat, his sister Dominique's
bosom friend. He couldn't remember the name of her protector, though Dominique had told him, mixed
up with her usual silvery spate of gossip—only that the man was a sugar planter who had given Phlosine
not only a small house on Rue des Ramparts but also two slaves and an allowance generous enough to
dress their tiny son like a little lace prince. At a guess the Indian maid was another of his sister's friends.

He looked around the courtyard again.

There were other "Indians" present, of course, among the vast route of Greek gods and cavaliers,
Ivanhoes and Rebeccas, Caesars and corsairs. The Last of the Mohicans was as popular here as it was
in Paris. January recognized Augustus Mayerling, one of the town's most fashionable fencing masters,