"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

January didn't really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland,
sleek smile and a murmured "Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn't hold with servants
leaving their work."
He'd never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug
insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite
all that Madame herself might try to do.
Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored
masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been
slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising
petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time,
perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he'd seen them together, it
was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.
The two Blanque girls-daughters of Delphine -Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean
Blanque-were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family: Though they
were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie,
the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the
household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her
twisted back and misaligned pelvis.
"I do my best," she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. "But as
you see, I'm no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch." Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of
boniness strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears,
readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d'esprit. Louise Marie was dressed as always
in the height of Paris fashion, the bell-shaped skirt of girlish yellow jaconet trimmed with blond lace,
flounces, and far too many silk roses. The bodice was specially cut, and the skirt specially hemmed, to
accommodate the twist of her spine and the uneven length of her legs.
"As long as you do your best, Mademoiselle Blanque," replied January, with the patient friendliness he
had long cultivated to deal with pupils he didn't much care for personally, "you'll make progress. This isn't
a race," he added, with a smile. "It's not like you have to be ready to open in Le Mariage de Figaro at
Christmas."
"Well, that's a blessing," muttered Pauline, prowling from the shuttered windows of the second-floor front
parlor where the piano stood. The younger sister slapped her fan on the piano's shining rosewood top,
then a moment later caught it up and beat the air with it again, as if the necessity to do so were unjust
penance imposed upon her alone. Though he had bathed before coming here, January felt the stickiness
of sweat on his face and under his shirt and coat.
In April or October, all the long windows onto the gallery would have been thrown wide at this time of
day to catch the breezes of coming evening. But now that was a luxury that could not be risked. Fever
rode the night air, invisible and deadly-that was all that anybody knew of it. The winter curtains of velvet
and tapestry had been exchanged for light chintz and gauze, but those were drawn closely over the tall
French doors; and the light they admitted was wan and sickly gray. The woven straw mats underfoot,
and the muslin covers masking the opulent furniture, did little to lighten or cool the room. With its mirrors
swathed in gauze, its ornaments veiled against flyspecks, the place had a shrouded atmosphere, tomblike
and drained of color.
"Oh, darling, please . . ." Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister's fan and produced
another cataclysmic sigh. "If you would . . . The heat affects me so!"
Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a
summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor-a partner at Jules Soublet's
clinic on Rue Bourbon-but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have
had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost
alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed
that Dr. Lalaurie-not a native Creole himself-knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger