"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which
most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the
magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Cholera and his local
cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard's
birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable even for widows in first
mourning to attend-not that there weren't boxes at the Theatre d'Orleans closed in with
latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.
And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies
of New Orleans's prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Marion Desdunes-that
very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers-had lost a brother to the cholera last summer
and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the
buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middleaged son.
Always entertained by the vagaries of human conduct, January distracted himself from the pain in
his arms and back by picking out exactly where in the ballroom the frontier between American
and French ran, an invisible Rubicon curving from the second of the Corinthian pilasters on the
north wall, to a point just south of the enormous, carven double doors opening to the upstairs hall.
French territory centered around Mrs. Pritchard, plump and plain and sweet faced, and the
brilliantly animated Madame Jumon, though now and then a Creole gentleman would pass that
invisible line to discuss business with the Colonel's friends: bankers, sugar brokers, importers,
and landlords, the planters having long since departed New Orleans for their acres. Every so often
one of the younger Americans would solicit the favor of a dance with one of Mrs. Pritchard's
younger Marcillac or Jumon cousins and to do them justice, January had to admit that for
Americans they were as well behaved as they probably knew how to be. For the most part, the
damsel would be rescued by a brother or a cousin or a younger uncle twice-removed who would
reply politely that Mademoiselle was desolate, but the dance was already promised to him. When
MadamMjumon's surviving son, a craggily saturnine gentleman of forty-five, showed signs of
leading Pritchard's middle-aged maiden sister out onto the floor, Madame quickly excused herself
from conversation and intercepted the erring gallant; January was hard put to hide a smile.
"Don't see what they got to be stuck-up about," grumbled a short, badly pomaded gentleman with
a paste ruby the size of an orange pip in his stickpin. "I don't care if their granddaddies were the
King of Goddam France, they're citizens of the United States now, just like we are. I got a good
mind to go back and take that gal's brother to account. . . ."
"Mr. Greenaway, please!" Emily Redfern, a stout little widow-who a moment ago had been
bargaining like a Levantine trader with the burly Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana-laid a
simpering black-mitted hand on the pomaded gentleman's arm. "That was Desiree Lafrenniere!
Of course her family. . . ." The Widow Redfern, January knew, had been trying for years to get
on the good side of the old Creole families. Little did she know how impossible that task was.
Mr. Greenaway's pale blue eyes moved from the widow's square-jawed, cold-eyed countenance
to her exceedingly expensive pearls. He smiled ingratiatingly. "Well, if it wouldn't intrude on
your grief too much, M'am, perhaps you would favor me by sitting this one out with me. . . ."
"I'll lay you it'll be Greenaway and Jonchere, before midnight," said Hannibal Sefton, when an
hour and a half later he and January slipped down the back stairs for a breath of air. "Greenaway's
been drinking like a fish and he always starts up on the Bank of the United States when he does
that. Jonchere's called out the last two men who supported Jackson. . . ."
"I'll put my money on the Colonel himself," said January, and gingerly moved his shoulder again.
There had to be some position in which he didn't hurt.
"Call out one of his own guests?" Hannibal took his laudanum bottle from his pocket and took a
swig; then offered it hospitably to January, who waved it away. He'd seen, and heard, Hannibal
play like the harps of Heaven when he was so lubricated as to be barely coherent, but for himself
music was a matter for the mind as well as for the soul. And the thought of being that defenseless