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

almost smiling January noticed she had a small mole in one corner, like a beauty-patch. The other
Grand Terre girls clumped like scared sheep in the corner and shrieked like parrots in a storm,
and January's mother, a chunk of sugar halfway to her coffee-cup, regarded the whole eruption
with an expression of disapproval and disgust and didn't stir from her chair.
As it happened, Livia was the only person in the room who had an accurate estimate of Jean
Lafitte's presence of mind and power over his men. The smuggler-boss was on his feet-without
toppling his chair-and across the dining-room in three long strides, outstripping even Captain
Beluche, who had a few yards' lead on him. Reaching Humbert's side, Lafitte held up his hand-
with no appearance of hurry, or of fear. It was how January remembered him best, in later years:
a tall, black-haired man in a black long-tailed coat, hand upraised, the other hand resting gently
on the furious old general's shoulder. As if to say to both Humbert and the enraged and
thoroughly inebriated corsairs, Let's all be quiet and think for a moment before this goes too far.
Humbert turned to him and burst into tears, laying his head on Lafitte's shoulder.
And as gently as if he had been the old man's son, Jean Lafitte led General Humbert from the
room.
Slightly more than two years later, when the British attempted to seize and hold New Orleans as
part of their long struggle against Napoleon, Jean Lafitte-rather to everyone's surprise-turned
down a cash offer from the British General Pakenham and volunteered his services to the
American forces under General Jackson instead. Benjamin January, twenty-one by then and as
well trained a surgeon as was possible for a young man of color to be in New Orleans, fought in
the free colored militia in the ensuing battle. Though the Americans won-and the British ceased
boarding and seizing the crews of American vessels-it was still several years before either he or
St.-Denis Janvier deemed it safe for him to risk a sea journey to France to continue his medical
studies.
He was in France for sixteen years. For the first six of those years he studied medicine, and
worked as a junior surgeon, at the Hotel Dieu. St.-Denis Janvier died in 1822, but the little money
he left his plaçee's son would not stretch to cover the expenses of buying a practice. Moreover, it
was quite clear to January by then that even in the land of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, no
white man was going to hire a black surgeon to cut him open if he could find a man of his own
color to do it instead. January tried not to be troubled by this, accepting it as he'd accepted the
fact that in his former home he'd had to step off the banquette to let white men pass....
And then he'd met Ayasha. And understood that if he wanted to marry this very young and very
competent Berber dressmaker-at eighteen she had her own shop, her own small clientele, and
looked like a desert witch inexplicably trying to pass herself off as a Parisian artisan-he'd need
money.
That was when, and why, he went back to music.
For ten years he played for the Opera, for the balls and parties of the restored nobility who'd
returned to Paris in the wake of Louis XVIII and of the wealthy who'd founded their fortunes on
the wreck of Napoleon's empire. For ten years he and Ayasha lived in happiness in a little flat on
the Rue de fAube near the river. In the newspapers he followed the careers of Lafitte, and
Humbert, and those privateer captains who'd once had their fortified camp on Grand Terre. His
account of General Humbert's birthday dinner became an after-dinner tale for his musician
friends, when Humbert became Commodore of the Navy of Mexico, or when word got out
concerning Dominic Youx's participation in the plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and
spirit him away to live out his days in a comfortable town house in New Orleans.
The American Navy ran Jean Lafitte out of his new headquarters on the Texas coast in 1821.
Rumors swirled about what became of him, but no one knew for sure. Rene Beluche became the
Commodore of the new nation of Venezuela. Vincente Gambi, and Antonino Angelo, and
Lafitte's captains met their fates variously at the hands of the American Navy or the British
campaign against pirates and slave-smugglers. Some simply encountered those deaths that