"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

up by men who think I'm carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion
planned."
"Then you'll just have to be careful," said Olympe, "won't you?"

January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents
attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies
were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's
mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orleans and various
gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of
January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.
"Not that it will do the slightest bit of good," said January grimly, "should Fourchet's overseer, or
his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief. Altruism is all very well, and I'm really sorry for
those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I'd just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer
in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I'm a free
man."
Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison,
the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his
desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness
under his shabby collar. "Prob'ly wouldn't do you much good anyways, if'n they're like my uncle
Zenas-Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton." Shaw scratched again, and looped
a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.
"Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from
the ground up includin' the furniture usin' only an ax, but he can't write for sour owl-shit. You
think you'll be in much more danger there than you'd be just walkin' around here?"
Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of
New Orleans-the entrepot and hub of slave-trading for the entire region-he was probably in more
peril of kidnapping than he'd be on Mon Triomphe.
"It's easy for you to say. Sir." In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was
going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right.
He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn't
willing to work for that justice himself.
"I understand that," said Shaw. "And I hope you understand I'd do it, if'n I didn't have certain
physical limitations that'd make me middlin' unconvincin' as a cane-hand."
January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the
Kentuckian's quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer . . .
If he didn't happen to be white. And, as he'd said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand.
So he only said, "What? You don't think you could pass?" and Shaw relaxed and returned his
unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch
and tightened his lips when it wasn't there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he'd given
up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he'd never been able to
afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white.
At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn't have had to go searching through pawnshops
for weeks to recover it, after it had been stolen by the same louts who'd cut his coat to ribbons
and torn up his music.
Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe's house now. A slave would
not possess such a thing.
"Yore pal Sefton'll be along," said Shaw reassuringly. "What do you know about Fourchet's son?"
"Not much." January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. "He's a few years
older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-
merchant here in town."