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

of Pachelbel-and January's soul had entered onto that magic road, that quest for beauty that had
no end.
He had studied healing also, and in much the same fashion: first with old Mambo Jeanne at
Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein,
lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man
of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the
English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the
slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul
and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between
France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January
had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.
He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic,
unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of
color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January
had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives
to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.
"At least here in Paris one is free," Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's
harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. "And no one can take that from you."
Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met
her, she owned her own shop.
No one can take that from you.
Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.
It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.
Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave
boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.
It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.
"That's absolute nonsense," blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. "Tom Jenkins says
he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much
less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside."
"Not in the countryside, no." Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the
little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. "On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the
countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city."
"Two?" Granville snorted. "Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they
were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife,
just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row."
"It's the newspapers," declared Colonel Pritchard. "Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell
their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property
values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold.
As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that
there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms. . . ."
Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him?
January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was
sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?
Yellow fever? Cholera?
Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.
And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if
someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through
moulinets, bris├йs, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of
flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the
glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away from the pain.