"Sarah A. Hoyt - The Blood Like Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyt Sarah A)

The Blood Like Wine
SARAH A. HOYT
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He stood by my hotel bed yesterday.

In the cool artificiality of a twenty-first-century hotel suite, with the curtains shut tight against the harsh
light of day, beside the massive, white wardrobe, Francois stood.

He wore his best suit of blue silk—long jacket edged with lace, and tight knee-length breeches that
molded his tall, muscular body. His golden curls fell to his shoulders, and his dark violet eyes were oh so
infinitely sad.

He walked to the bed and opened his lace collar with a gloved finger, revealing the red line where the
guillotine had separated his head from his body.

And he said nothing. Nothing. And yet, I knew all too well what he meant.

He vanished when I sat up. He always vanished. Like cherished smoke, like unreachable paradise, like
longed-for death.

I sat beside the small desk and smoked my mint-laced cigarettes till sunset turned the world outside as
dark as my hotel room.

Then I’d showered, dressed in my fuck-me-red dress, which went with my fuck-me-red painted nails,
and with my blood red high heels, pulled back my straight, golden hair, got into my black sports car and
hit the road.

I’d made contact. I had the address. I would do what Francois wanted.

I always did what Francois wanted. It was all I had left.

==========

We’d met when we were both seventeen. Which is not to say we were the same age. Born in Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, where rats outnumbered people ten to one, where the streets were so narrow and the
houses on either side so high that the sun never touched the shit-layered streets, I’d had no time for
childhood.

But I was one of the lucky ones: I’d survived.

By twelve, I was an orphan. My mother died giving birth to me. My father, a poor cobbler, died of
desperation and tiredness in 1786.

I didn’t know the date then, but I know it now. I didn’t know how to read then, but I know it now.

Look at the gifts death has heaped upon me.

They said that my father died of a fever. All were fevers, then, and it might have been anything at all: a
cold, an un-healed sore, tuberculosis or cancer. All of it then was .a fever—stinking sweat upon the dirty