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

autumn light crystallized the chaos along the levee into the brilliant confusion of a Brueghel
painting: steamboats like floating barns, with their black smokestacks and bright paint on their
wheel-housings and superstructures; low brown oystercraft and bum-boats creeping among them
like palmetto bugs among the cakes and loaves on a table. Keelboats, snub-nosed and crude,
being hauled by main force to the wharves. The blue coats of captains and pilots; the occasional
red flash of some keelboatman's shirt; gold heaps of oranges or lemons; a whore's gay dress. Piles
of corn in the husk, tomatoes, bales of green-gray wiry moss, or tobacco from the American
territories to the north. Boxes without number, pianos, silk, fine steel tools from Germany and
England. A cacophony of French and Spanish, English and half-African gombo patois and the
mingling scents of coffee, sewage, smoke.
"He beat her, Rose. Beat her with a riding crop-I was there-and used her as a man would take
shame on himself to use a whore. He cracked two of my ribs beating me, and I couldn't have been
six years old. Once when my mother got in a fight with another woman, he nailed her up in the
barrel in the corner of the barn, a flour barrel you couldn't stand up in. Does she remember none
of that?"
Rose Vitrac stirred her own coffee, and with a gloved forefinger propped her spectacles more
firmly onto the bridge of her nose. The small thick oval slabs of glass aged her face beyond its
twenty-eight years, and gave it an air of aloofness. Behind them her hazel-green eyes-legacy of a
white father and a white grandfather-were wise and kind and cynical. "If you take his money," the
former schoolmistress pointed out, "you'll be able to get your own rooms. You'll no longer have
to live with her."
"Would you do it?" he asked. "Spy on a man's slaves for him?"
"I don't think that I could." A line of men and women passed close to the half-empty arcade,
through the chaos of hogs and cotton bales and sacks on the levee, to the gangplank of the
Bonnets o' Blue. Shackled together, the slaves were bound for one of the new cotton plantations
in the Missouri territory, each clutching a few small possessions done up in a bandanna.
Afternoon sun sparkled on the water, but the wind that tore at their clothing and at the flags of the
riverboat jackstaffs was sharp. One woman wept bitterly. Rose turned her head to watch them,
her delicate mouth somber.
"My mother was a free woman," she said. "I was never a slave. I don't think I could pass myself
off as one, because I don't know all those little things, the things you learn as a child. If someone
wronged me I'd go to the master, which I gather isn't done . . ."
"Good God, no!" January was shocked to his soul that she'd even suggest it.
Rose spread her hands. "I've never been that dependent on someone's whim," she said. Her voice
was a low alto-like polished wood rather than silver-and, like Fourchet, she had the speech of an
educated Creole, not the French of France. "Not even my father's. And it does something to you,
when you're raised that way. When I lived on my father's plantation, after Mother's death, my
friend Cora-the maid's daughter-taught me a lot, but just being told isn't the same. I think that's
why Lieutenant Shaw directed Monsieur Fourchet to you."
Savagely, January muttered, "I can't tell you how honored I feel."
"But as to whether I would spy, if I could . . . Somebody did murder the poor butler, Ben. That
the poison was meant for the master doesn't make the servant less dead."
His eyes avoided hers. "It isn't my affair."
"No. Of course not. Justice for a slave isn't anyone's affair."
That this was something January himself would have said-had he not just refused to become
involved in Simon Fourchet's war with his slaves-didn't help the slow pain of the anger he felt,
and he looked for a time out into the square. A man cursed at the deck crew unloading bales of
cotton from the steamboat Lancaster; a young woman in the black-and-white habit of a nun
stopped with wide fascinated eyes to listen, and her older companion seized her arm and pulled
her along. Two boys, white and black, rolled a hoop across the earth of the Place d'Armes just