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

cuts on his face, superficial but adding to his appearance of coarse menace.
The plaçees of these "friends" drifted behind them, gowned in silks and chattering among
themselves. They were less fashionable, more sumptuous, and far more heavily jeweled than their
town counterparts. Down on Grand Terre, where Lafitte had his headquarters these days, the free
colored ladies lived with their men openly, as wives, instead of keeping separate establishments
as the town plaçees did. January noticed that his mother and her friends kept their distance from
them, not in open enmity, but with a cool politeness that spoke volumes for what was going to be
said about their dress, speech, and taste in ornamentation over chicory-laced coffee the following
morning.
Hesione LeGros was one of these Grand Terre ladies. January noticed her because she was one of
the youngest, probably his own age, and also one of the darkest. Among the free colored
community, as among the whites, dark skin and African features were not admired. January had
grown up with the knowledge that his own huge size and African blackness were a reminder of
the slave father whose name his mother never spoke, and this knowledge was ground in upon him
every time any stranger, white or colored, heard the delicate strength of his piano-playing and
looked astonished.
From the first time he'd played a recital, he'd been aware that they would not have looked so
surprised if he were fair-skinned or white.
Most of the plaçees were quadroon or octoroon, complexions shaded anywhere from soft matte
walnut to the hue of very old ivory. A few, like his mother, were mulatto, of African mothers and
white fathers. The wealthiest businessmen of the town favored the lightest-skinned women:
fairness itself was a commodity. Hesione-though January didn't learn her name until years later-
was richly dark. Unlike most of the others she pointed up undeniably African features by wearing
a gold silk gown so vibrant it bordered on rust, a color no white woman would have dared to put
on. A necklace of topaz and citrine ringed her throat like a collar of fire, and plumes dyed gold
and black blossomed above her tignon. As January played-Mozart rondos and snippets of
Rossini, light-handed on the five-octave Erard in the corner of the Marine Hotel's dining-room-he
looked out over the jostle of heads and backs and saw that nodding explosion of sable and flame,
like the single oak on a little island in a marsh.
The tables were set out in the old-fashioned French manner, sparkling with the hotel's very fine
silver and Limoges-ware dishes. Oysters in lemon, gumbo of shrimp, Italian pates and vol-au-
vents; artichokes and turkey-poults and turtle roasted en croute. As the hotel servants went
around with the wine-which the new owner, Mr. Davis, bought from Lafitte at a substantial
discount-the conversation grew louder. The bankers speculated as to what full statehood in the
United States was going to mean now to Louisiana and freely slandered the new Governor
Claiborne and all his works. The planters cursed what the war between the Allies and France was
doing to sugar prices. January heard for the first time about the sinking-by pirates-of the
American brig Independence, a subject brought up by a pink-faced British planter named Trulove
and hushed at once by Jean Blanque: "The less said of that," the banker murmured with a glance
toward the table of Lafitte and his cronies, "the better for all it will be." News had reached New
Orleans only that day of the Independence's destruction, brought by a man named Williams, the
sole survivor of the massacre.
"What I want to know, is," persisted Trulove, who like everyone else in the room was fairly
drunk, "what was a dashed Massachusetts merchantman carrying from Africa to Cuba in the first
place, eh? Dashed Americans complain about Lafitte and his men smuggling slaves in through
the Barataria marshes, and what are they buying along the coast of Africa, eh? Bananas? Tell me
that!"
"I shall tell you nothing of the kind," replied Blanque gently, laying a restraining hand on the
young Englishman's arm. He hadn't anything to worry about, really, for Lafitte and his men were
roaring with laughter over Dominic Youx's tale of the Bishop of Cartagena and a shipload of