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

would not give her son so much as a nod when they separately reached the Marine Hotel. January
would be present at General Humbert's birthday dinner strictly as a hired musician, a profession
he'd worked at since the age of sixteen concurrent with such medical studies as were available to
a young free man of color in that time and place. St.-Denis Janvier, his mother's protector, was
one of the guests, a select gang of the wealthier businessmen of the town assembled to honor the
elderly war-horse. Most of them would be accompanied by their mistresses. It was not the sort of
party to which one brought one's wife.
And Livia Janvier-she'd taken her protector's name, as many free colored plaçees did-wasn't the
sort of woman who'd admit to being the mother of one of the musicians.
This would have been true even if her son hadn't been all of nineteen years old, six feet three
inches tall, and very obviously the offspring of an African rather than a white man. As the guests
came into the hotel's dining-room that night, to the bright strains of a Mozart overture, it was St.-
Denis Janvier, and not Livia, who caught January's eye and smiled.
January knew most of the other guests by sight. In 1812, New Orleans wasn't that big a town. The
women present were mostly friends, or enemies, of his mother.
These ladies of the free colored demimonde were by and large plaçees-placed with a single
protector, though one lady he recognized as a highly-paid courtesan. About half the men were
businessmen and planters: he noted the tall, powerful form of Jean Blanque the banker, whose
name graced nearly every financial transaction in the town and whose young and beautiful wife
(not present) was the daughter of Barthelmy de McCarry, brother of the wealthiest planter in the
district. De McCarty came in just behind Blanque, joking with his brother Jean Baptiste. Both of
their mistresses, exquisitely-gowned women of color, wore silk tignons-headscarves-that were
plumed and jeweled mockeries of the law that forbade women of African ancestry, slave or free,
to go about in public with uncovered hair.
Bernard Marigny was there, a lively little French Creole planter notorious for his gambling and
his duels. As he came in he was laughing over something with a tall, black-clad gentleman whom
January recognized as Jean Lafitte.
If you wanted anything in New Orleans, duty-free or difficult to obtain, you could probably get it
through Jean Lafitte. Four years previously, when it became illegal to im port slaves into United
States Territory, Lafitte had surfaced, lounging around the blacksmith shop he and his brother
owned on Rue Bourbon or drinking with businessmen and planters in the Cafe Tremoulet.
Somehow, the handsome young Gascon always had a slave or two to sell. Of course these slaves
were always warranted born in American territory. Of course the sales were private, between
gentlemen, nothing on the open market. Lafitte sold brandies, too, and fine French silks.... In fact,
anything you might want.
And cheaply, as if United States customs duties did not exist.
Though Lafitte didn't have a mistress with him, he didn't arrive at the birthday dinner alone. In
addition to Marigny-who was friends with everyone in town except his own wife-Lafitte entered
with his usual coterie of "friends": a planter named Huette, who had a place on Bayou St. John
where boats could be landed that came off the lake; the fair-haired Pierre Lafitte, his newest
mistress on his arm; a dark little man named Laporte who kept the books for the Lafitte brothers;
and Jean Baptiste Sauvinet, one of the most prominent bankers of the town. Lafitte moved in the
highest circles of French Creole society, among the men, at least.
There were others, less respectable, whom January had seen only at a distance in the cafes and
the market. The fierce and jovial sea-captain Dominic Youx. Cut-Nose Chighizola, whose face
was a mass of scars-at the moment he was explaining in voluminous Italian-accented French to a
planter named St. Geme how he'd lost his nose in battle against the Spanish. The dark and sinister
Captain Beluche, of the "Bolivian" privateer vessel Spy. Vincente Gambi, another Italian, strode
along on the outskirts of the group, glancing at the silverware and the cut-crystal pitchers on the
tables as if calculating their worth. He had, January noticed, what looked like a couple of fresh