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

With the back edge of the scalpel it was ridiculously easy to Hip the window catch. All these cottages
were built the same, and he knew the layout of the Pellicot attic was identical to that of his mother's
home. Two chambers and a perilously steep wooden stairway that led down through the cabinet tacked
onto the back of the house, a little pantry-cum-warming room opening in its turn into the rear parlor,
which served as a dining room. Within moments January crossed through the dining room, through the
archway to the front parlor, and flipped the catch on the shutters of the tall French doors that looked
onto the street. Stepping out, he closed the shutters silently behind him and rounded the corner of the
house into the pass-through again.
"You wanted to have a word with me?"
The woman-girl-who stood peeking cautiously through the gate into the yard spun, her hand flying to her
mouth. She blundered back against the fence, catching the gate for support. January said, "There's no
way out, that way."
He walked down the passage, more wary that she'd try to bolt past him or that someone else might come
in behind, than from any fear that she might be armed. As he got close he saw that her clothing was plain
but very well cut. The dark red cotton gown, high waisted and with narrow sleeves made down to the
wrists, was the kind a young girl of good family might wear. By the fit of the bust, it hadn't been made for
her. The headcloth mandated by law for all black or colored women was- dark red too, but tied as a
servant, or a country-bred slave, would tie it. His younger sister Dominique had tried to initiate him into
the intricacies of the proper tying of tignons into fanciful, seductive, or outrageous styles in defiance of the
law, but without much success. January knew a confection when he saw one, though, and this wasn't a
confection. It was a headcloth, the mark of a slave's humility.
"Why did you follow me?"
"Are you M'sieu Benjamin Janvier?" The girl spoke the sloppy Creole French of the plantations, more
than half African. Any town mother would have whaled the life out of a girl who used vo for vous, at least
any mother who'd have been able to afford that dress.
"That's me." He kept his voice as unalarming as possible. At his size, he was aware that he was alarming
enough. "And I have the honor of addressing . . . ?"
She straightened her shoulders in her red dress, a little slip of a thing, with a round defiant chin and a
trace of hardness in her eyes that may have been fear. Pretty, January thought. He could have picked her
up in one hand.
"I'm Cora . . ." She hesitated, fishing, then went on with just a touch of defiance, ". . . LaFayette. Cora
LaFayette. I needed to speak with you, Michie Janvier. Are you a music teacher?"
"I am that," he sighed.
After ten years he still didn't know whether to feel amused or angry about having to work as a musician.
There were free men of color who made a living-and a good living-as physicians and surgeons in New
Orleans, but they were without exception light of skin. Quadroon or octoroon, they were for the most
part offspring of white men and the women for whom they bought these pastel houses along this street.
In his way, St. Denis Janvier had been as much an optimist as his mulatto placee's son had been,
concerning the chances a man with three African grandparents would have of earning his living in
medicine in New Orleans or elsewhere, Paris training or no Paris training.
Cora LaFayette looked down, small face a careful blank, rallying her words, desperate to get them right.
January relaxed a little and smiled, folding his big arms in their sweat-damp muslin sleeves. "You followed
me all the way from Charity Hospital to ask what I charge for lessons?"
Her head carne up, like a deer startled in the woods, and she saw the gentle teasing in his eyes.
Something eased, very slightly, in the corners of that expressionless little mouth.
But she did not smile. She dwelled in a country where smiles had been forgotten years ago. "Do you
teach the daughters of a lady name Lalaurie? Great big green house on Rue Royale?"
January nodded again. He glanced around him at the narrow tunnel they stood in, between Agnes
Pellicot's house and that of Guillaume Morisset the tailor, also out of town. The slot of shadow stank of
mud and sewage where mosquito-wrigglers flickered among the scum. "You want to go somewhere a