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

little more comfortable, Mademoiselle LaFayette? The town's half closed up, but at Breyard's Grocery
over on Rue Toulouse I can get you a lemonade."
Eyes that seemed too big for that pointed, delicate face raised quickly and as quickly darted away. She
shook her head, a tiny gesture, and January stepped past her, still cautiously, to push open the gate that
led into the Pellicot yard. The French doors into the house were shuttered, as were the doors of the
service building at the back of the yard. The brick-flagged porch below the slave quarters' gallery was a
slab of blue-black velvet. January led the girl to the plank bench outside the kitchen where Agnes's cook
Elvire would sit to shell peas or pluck fowl, and said, "Wait here a minute for me, if you would,
Mamzelle."
She stiffened, panic in her eyes.
"I'm just going around to latch the door. I'll be back." He was conscious of her, bolt upright and
motionless as a scared cat, on the bench as he crossed through the yard again, down the blue tunnel of
passway, and out to Rue Burgundy. He stepped back through the French doors into Agnes Pellicot's
parlor and latched them; and on the way through the cabinet pantry to the stairs, he found a cheap horn
cup on a shelf beside the French china dinner service. This he carried in his waistcoat pocket up the
stairs, through the attic, out the window, across the roof, and down the outside stairs, marveling that he'd
made that circuit earlier at a dead run. It was a wonder what you could do with a good scare in you.
When he returned to the yard Cora LaFayette was gone. He saw her a moment later just within the gate
to the pass-through out to the street, poised to run.
He waited in the middle of the yard, as he'd have waited not to startle a deer in the cypress swamps
behind the plantation where he'd been born. In time she came away from the gate and hurried to the
bench again, keeping close to the wall.
Runaway, he thought. And making more of it than she needed to. Did she really think that with the fever
and the cholera stalking the streets, with the town half-empty and fear like the stench of the smoke in the
air, that anybody would be chasing a runaway slave?
He filled the horn cup from the coopered cistern in the corner of the yard and held it out to her. Cora
drank thirstily, and he sat on the other end of the bench, laying coat, hat, and satchel down beside him.
Aside from her dress, which was not a countrywoman's dress, her hands and face were clean. She'd
been in town a little time.
"Do you know Madame Lalaurie?" he asked her, when she set the cup aside. "Or know of her?"
The girl shook her head. "That is, I know she's a rich lady, if she's got a big house like that, and bought
slaves." She looked down at the toes of her shoes, black and red, to match the dress, with frivolous
white lacings. "She bought a houseman, only a week or so ago, name of Gervase, from my master-that
used to be my master, before he freed me," she added hastily. "Michie . . ." She hesitated, fishing around
for corroborative detail again. If her name were LaFayette her master's would probably be, too, so she
said, "Michie Napoleon LaFayette: But Michie LaFayette, he set me free, and I come to town looking
for Gervase. We were married, me and Gervase. Really married, Michie Janvier, by a priest and
everything."
Her dark eyes were childishly earnest, looking into his, but he saw in the flinch of her mouth, heard in the
inflection of her voice, that she lied. Not that it was his business. There were a lot of men who didn't want
their people to marry, or even to become Christians. But it wasn't any of his affair, though as a Christian
he hoped this girl had at least been baptized. He asked, "So why didn't you try to see Gervase yourself?"
"I did!" She spread out her child-small hands, with the roughened skin of washing-up on the fingers and
backs. "I tried. I went to the house on Rue Royale, and they always keep the big gate there shut. That
coachman of Madame's there, he wouldn't let me in. I asked him." There was anger in the set of the little
mouth. "He just smiled at me nasty and said Gervase was busy and Madame wouldn't have her people
taking time off from their work to chat with girls in the street. I told him I was his sister," she added
naively, and sighed.
January forebore to mention how many "sisters" and "cousins" and "brothers" came loitering around to
speak to servants in the twilight. Only the slackest of mistresses would permit such dalliance, and