"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 07 - Days of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Rose removed her spectacles, sought vainly for some portion of her clothing not thick with dust in
order to clean the dusty lenses, then sighed and resignedly replaced them on her nose. "You don't think
Hannibal actually did it, do you?"

This was a question they'd asked each other for three weeks now, when not occupied with the logistics
of honey-moon copulation in a stateroom bunk barely the size of a particularly stingy coffin. (The Belle
Marquise, out of New Orleans to Vera Cruz, transported pineapples, tobacco, and the insect life that
invariably accompanied them, and the floor was not an option.) Mostly they wondered if their friend-of
average height and skeletally thin from the rav-ages of consumption-could have physically accomplished
murder.

And the answer, of course, was yes. Even were "young Fernando" as tall as January and, like January,
built upon what English novelists liked to call Herculean lines, there was always poison, there were
firearms, there was the possi-bility of a stiletto in the back in a darkened room. January and Rose had
whiled away many hours evolving such hy-pothetical scenarios ("What if Fernando habitually wore a steel
breastplate to bed?"

"One can mix sulfate of mercury with candle-wax and make a poisoned candle that when burned will
kill the person in the room....") as they strolled the decks of the Belle Marquise, waiting for a northern
wind to fill the sails for those last few maddening miles into Vera Cruz; and, latterly, as they'd had the
mar-row pounded out of their bones by the frantic pace of the diligencia over rutted mountain roads.

In the absence of the slightest information about the victim, the circumstances, or any conceivable
motivation for the murder, it was as good a way as any to pass the time.

But that wasn't what Rose meant now, and January knew it.

His mind returned to the reeking heat and darkness of the waterfront at New Orleans, the tail-end of
summer, 1832. Even at that hour of the night-and he'd heard the Cathedral clock strike three as he'd left
the gar├зonni├йre above his mother's kitchen-there was activity along the levee, stevedores unloading bales
from the big, ugly flat-sided steamboats, filthy ruffians in coarse calico shirts and heavy Conestoga boots
driving pigs from the flatboats by the light of torches, whores in tawdry dresses plying their trade in the
shadows. Music jingled from the saloons along Rue du Levee, where men gambled through the night;
somewhere a slave gang hauling wood onto a boat wailed a primitive holler. Roaches the size of mice
crept on the sides of the warehouses, or flew with roaring wings around the flaming cressets; the warm air
breathed and blew with the storm that flickered far out over the Gulf.

New Orleans. The home January had fled sixteen years before, seeking education and freedom in
France.

He'd made his way along the levee, away from the docks where the steamboats waited three deep and
toward the taller masts of the ocean-going ships. The Duchesse Ivrogne, on which he'd come from
France only two days be-fore, would not even yet have left port. When he'd risen, sleepless, dressed,
and gone out, he'd told himself it was to see if the Duchesse was still in port, and to learn what her
captain would ask to take him back to France again, though what the man would have been doing up at
three in the morning January hadn't considered-perhaps in his heart he'd known that wasn't his intent at
all. Around the ships the dark was thicker, and there was little activity be-yond the scurryings of rats.
Between the wet hulks, the river gleamed with the reflection of the distant torches, the occasional
riding-light.