"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

shoulder blades, muscles, and spine. He'd been a surgeon for six years at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris
and knew exactly how heavy a human arm was, but it seemed to him that he'd never quite
appreciated that weight as he did now, after an hour and a half of playing quick-fire waltzes and
polkas on the piano with an injury that hadn't healed.
A shift of the night air brought the smell of smoke again, the knocking of the drums, and the hot
brief stink of blood. His eyes met the cook's. The cook looked away.
Not my business, thought January, and mounted the stairs. He guessed what was going on.
The air in the ballroom seemed waxy and thick as ambergris: one could have cut it in slices with
a wire. Pomade and wool, spilled wine and the gas lamps over head, and-because at least two-
thirds of the guests were Americans-the acrid sweet sourness of spit tobacco. January edged
through the servants' door and, behind the screen of potted palmettos and wilting vines that
sheltered the musicians, sought to resume his seat at the piano as inconspicuously as it was
possible for a man six feet, three inches tall; built like a bull; and black as a raw captive new-
dragged down the gangplank of a slave ship from the Guinea coast, and never mind the neat
black coat, the linen shirt and white gloves, the spotless cravat.
Hannibal Sefton, who'd been distracting the guests from the fact that there hadn't been a dance for
nearly ten minutes, glanced at him inquiringly and segued from "Di tanti" into a Schubert lied;
January nodded his thanks. The fiddler was sheet white in the gaslight and perspiration ran down
the shivering muscles of his clenched jaw, but the music flowed gracefully, like angels dancing.
January didn't know how he did it. Since an injury in April, January had been unable to play at
any of the parties that made up his livelihood in America-he should not, he knew, be playing
now; but finances were desperate, and it would be a long summer. He, at least, he thought, had
the comfort of knowing that he would heal.
Voices around them, rough and nasal in the harsh English tongue January hated:
"Oh, hell, it's just a matter of time before the Texians have enough of Santa Anna. Just t'other day
I heard there's been talk of them breakin' from Mexico. . . ."
"Paid seven hundred and thirty dollars for her at the downtown Exchange, and turns out not only
was she not a cook, but she has scrofula into the bargain!"
Colonel Pritchard was an American, and a fair percentage of New Orleans's American business
community had turned out to sample Aeneas's cold sugared ham and cream tarts. But here and
there in the corners of the room could be heard the softer purr of Creole French.
"Any imbecile can tell you the currency must be made stable, but why this imbecile Jackson
believes he can do so by handing the country's money to a parcel of criminals. . . ."
And, ominously, "My bank, sir, was one of those to receive the redistributed monies from the
Bank of the United States. . . ."
"You all right?" Uncle Bichet leaned around his violoncello to whisper, and January nodded. A
lie. He felt as if knives were being run into his back with every flourish of the piano keys. In the
pause that followed the lie, while January, Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and nephew Jacques changed
their music to the "Lancers Quadrille," the drums could be clearly heard, knocking and tapping
not so very far from the house.
You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie
Mozart's little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the ciprière?
All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?
About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone?
Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?
If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the
drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholira and to her who in her life was my wife.
And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses,
swirling the drums' dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center
that the world's caprices could not touch.