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

Madame Delphine Lalaurie was known for the silent efficiency of her servants. "So you want me to talk
to Gervase?"
Cora nodded. "If you would, M'sieu. After the second time that coachman-that Bastien-turn me away, I
watched the house, and I saw you go in. The cripple-man selling water across the street, he say you was
the music teacher for Madame Lalaurie's two girls. He say you also work at the Charity Hospital during
the fever season, so when I . . . I couldn't wait for you to come out of the house, I look for you at the
Hospital."
Where there was too much of a crowd for you to want to come up to me, thought January, studying that
wary, triangular face. It didn't surprise him that the water seller would know everything about him. In
New Orleans, the vendors who sold everything from strawberries to fire irons through the narrow streets
knew everything about everyone.
But that, too, was none of his business. This girl's lover had been sold, and she had run away to see him
again. For all his mother's talk about the unruliness of blacks (not that his mother was so much as a
half-shade paler than Cora LaFayette) he could not blame her for it. "What would you like me to tell
Gervase?"
Her smile transformed her like spring dawn, not just her face but her tense little body as well. Joy became
her. Then she swallowed, again, thinking hard and contemplating once more the toes of her
red-and-black shoes. "Could you ask him if there's a way we can see each other? If there's a way he can
get out? Just for an evening, I mean, M'sieu. They keep that gate closed tight all the time. I'll meet you
here," she went on quickly. "If that's all right with you, Michie Janvier. Tomorrow night?"
"Wednesday," said January. "Wednesday afternoon. I teach the Lalaurie girls Tuesdays and Fridays, and
I'm working at the Hospital Tuesday night."
"Wednesday afternoon." She got to her feet, her smile coming and going, like a child fearing to hex a
wish. "'I'll be here, Michie Janvier. Thank you."
She looked so fragile, standing poised in the brazen sunlight, that it was on January's tongue to ask her if
she had a place to stay. But if she were a runaway, he thought, she wouldn't tell him. And if she were a
runaway it was better that he didn't know. Still he felt a pang of worry for her, as she darted away like a
small rusty damselfly into the dark beyond the gate.
He shrugged his coat back on, shifting his wide shoulders beneath it, shirt gummy with sweat. As he
donned his hat again, tucked his bag under his arm and crossed Agnes Pellicot's yard, he thought of his
own room behind his mother's house, his own bed, and a few hours' sleep without the stink of death in
his nostrils, without the whimpers of the dying in his ears.
Mostly the runaways went back home. They had nowhere else to go. Their families and their friends
were all on the home place, wherever the home place was, like the villages in Africa from which their
parents and grandparents had come. He remembered someone-his father?telling him about how in old
times there'd been whole villages of escaped Africans in the ciprfere, the cypress swamps that lay behind
the line of river plantations. They'd raised their own food, hunted, and set scouts, hidden from the eyes of
the whites. But that was long gone even in his childhood.
Still, at Bellefleur where he'd been born, there were a couple of the hands who ran off two or three times
a year, to live in the woods for a few days or a week. They never went far.
Maybe that was because they knew they wouldn't get more than a beating. A beating was worth it, as far
as they were concerned. It was the price they were willing to pay for earth and peace and silence of
heart. Try as he would, January could not recall whether his father had been one of them.
He let himself out the gate. Cora LaFayette-or whatever her name actually was-had vanished from the
empty street. January strode quickly toward his mother's house, sweating in the penitential coat. Twice he
looked around, as if he half expected to see the black, tall, smoky form of Bronze John himself stepping
through the thin scrim of gutter steam. But he saw only Hèlier the water seller, with his buckets and his
yoke on his twisted back, calling out hopefully, "Water! Water! Clean cold water!" to the shut and bolted
houses.
Benjamin January prayed that when he slept, he would not dream.