"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Benjamin January
Book 6


Wet Grave


Barbara Hambly

For Jill and Charles

Special thanks are due to Pamela Arceneaux and all the staf F of the Historic New Orleans
Collection; to Andy and Sue Galliano: to Jessica Harris; to Mary-Lynne and Lou Costa; to all the
folks at Le Monde Creole and at Lucullus; Kate Miciak and Kathleen Baldonado of Bantam
Books; and to all my friends for their patience with me.
ONE

The only time Benjamin January ever actually exchanged words with Hesione LeGros was when
they were both hiding behind a piano in a New Orleans hotel hoping they wouldn't be massacred
by pirates.
It wasn't a long conversation.
She said, "I'm gonna shoot that fuckin' man of mine for this."
And January-who had just turned nineteen and was hoping to make twenty-replied, "What makes
you think any of us will live to see you do that?"
As it happened, someone else shot her man a number of years later in the Yucatan, but at the time
January hoped that the dark-eyed little African Venus beside him would have that honor, and
fairly soon. The man certainly deserved it.
The whole debacle began, tamely enough, with the arrival in New Orleans of Major-General Jean
Robert Marie Humbert, formerly of the Grand Army of Napoleon. Humbert, in that year of 1812,
was avoiding Napoleon's various domains because of opinions he'd rashly expressed after the
Little Emperor had relieved him of command. Some said this was because Humbert's army had
ignominiously failed to re-conquer the island of Saint-Domingue from rebelling slaves. But
January's mother-a clearinghouse for gossip concerning both the white and the free colored
communities in New Orleans-was of the opinion that Humbert's affair with Napoleon's sister had
something to do with it.
"Though I don't see why Napoleon should cut up stiff over Humbert," Livia Janvier had added,
pinning an aigrette of diamonds to the confection of rose-colored silk and plumes that covered
her hair. She studied the result critically in the mirror. "The woman's slept with his entire general
staff, most of his marshals, and is now working her way down through the colonels. I can't
imagine how she keeps their names straight when she encounters them at military reviews."
She propped an elbow on the dressing-table and held up her hand peremptorily for her maid,
who'd been gently dusting talcum powder into the fingers of a pair of long white kid gloves. Livia
Janvier didn't even glance at the maid as the young woman set to work easing and moulding the
soft, close-fitting leather over her mistress' knuckles and palm. When January's mother was
dressing to meet her protector-the man who had bought her and her two small children from
slavery eleven years previously-she displayed a meticulous patience, a concentration like an
artist's that January found fascinating to watch. "Don't you stay out late after you get done
playing tonight, p'tit," she added. "And make sure that M'sieu Davis pays you. Promises are
cheap."
It went without saying that January's mother, slender as a bronze lily at the age of thirty-six,