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

awaited so many white men in Louisiana: yellow fever, malaria, typhus.
In 1832 the Indian cholera reached Paris. Ayasha died.
January returned to New Orleans-to the town he had hoped never to live in again. To the only
family he knew. To a city he had left while it was still an outpost of France in the New World.
But he found, on his return, that the city had been inundated in his absence with Americans intent
on making a profit from slavery, from sugar, from cotton, and from everything else they could lay
their hands on. Much of the city was now the province of upriver Kentuckians whose
rapaciousness made Lafitte and his cronies look modest and whose manners made even such
hard-bitten souls as Cut-Nose Chighizola appear refined.
For a few years January lived in the garçonniere behind his mother's house, the small separate
chamber traditionally given to the growing son of the household. His mother had married a free
carpenter of color upon St.-Denis Janvier's death, and was now a respectable widow. January
made new friends, and renewed his ties with old. He played at quadroon balls and at the Opera,
and at the parties of Americans, free colored, and Creole French alike; he found refuge in the
familiar joys of music from the almost unbearable pain of loss in his heart.
He met a young schoolmistress named Rose Vitrac, Ayashas opposite in nearly every way:
erudite, gawky, bespectacled, and so heart-scarred and frightened of men that it was nearly a year
before she could endure the touch of his hand without pulling away.
He learned, a little to his surprise, that it was possible to love passionately without lessening for a
moment the ache of the love that had gone before.
And in all those years since 1812 he never so much as remembered Hesione LeGros' face, until
one day in the summer of 1835, when he walked into a shack near the back of town and saw her
dead body, with her head in a puddle of blood.
TWO

"When you a woman and black-not to mention dirt poor, God forbid"-the mocking sparkle in
Olympe Corbier's dark eyes was like the flash of dragonflies over a bitter lake-"there ain't a man
in this town'll smirch his boots crossin' the street to save your life. What makes you think
anybody'd come out here after she's already dead?"
Kneeling on the floor beside the body, January looked up at his sister, who had knocked at the
door of his lodgings an hour after sun-up, asking him to come with her here. He knew she was
right.
Olympe was his full sister, by that African field-hand his mother never spoke about. When at
sixteen she'd run away to join the voodoos, her mother hadn't even troubled to look for her. Her
work as healer and midwife among the poorer artisans, laborers, and freedmen of the town had
given her scant respect for the whites who made the city's laws.
Still it angered him that the City Guards hadn't troubled to send an officer out to this straggle of
shanties, shelters, and one- and two-room cottages huddled on the fringe of the still-more-
unsavory district of town universally known as the Swamp. It wasn't more than half a mile from
the turning-basin of the canal that connected New Orleans with the lake, and probably less than a
mile from the river itself. Although one of the liveliest and wealthiest cities in the United States
lay so close, oaks and cypress still grew among the wretched dwellings here; reeds and
marshgrass stood thick just outside the door.
It wasn't nine in the morning and the heat was like a hammer. Flies crept thick over every splash
and puddle of the blood-trail that started by the shack's upstream wall and ended under the body.
The cloud of insects overhead, up under the shack's low roof, made a dull droning, inescapable as
the stink of sewage or the sticky creep of sweat behind January's shirt-collar.
Heat, stink, flies. Summer in New Orleans.
"I heard how you not supposed to move somebody who been killed," said one of the neighbors,
peering in around Olympe's slim, tall form. A square young man, he wore the numbered tin