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

Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing
arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread
of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles
flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in
his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of
plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs.
January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.
"Lemonade only, you understand?" January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial
eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. "Mrs.
Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want
the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them
wasted. Mrs. Pritchard . . ."
His voice lifted in a preemptory yap. His wife-who might have been presumed to have earned a
little privilege on the night of her own birthday ball-turned with a sigh from the farewell
embraces of her friends.
"He's quite right," said the Widow Redfern, who had wormed her way-Mr. Greenaway doglike in
tow-into the Creole group of ladies. "I find one always has to count the champagne bottles after a
party, and measure the sugar. It's really quite prudent of your husband . . ."
"Am├йricaines," murmured Madame Jumon, flashing a humorous grimace as she kissed Mrs.
Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded
arm. "What can one do?"
Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister
Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He
had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to
the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the
kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water
glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers,
creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow
roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.
Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned
gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.
"Uncle Ben!"
"You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake." Aeneas set aside the mixing
bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.
"Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup." The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported
January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. "You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook,
you come speak to me about it, hear?"
"I'll do that." January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock
gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line
the liquid had left. "Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the
Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?"
Aeneas laughed. "Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or
he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the
saucers in?"
They had to know, thought January, looking at the kitchen maid Kitta, the watchful-eyed little
Dan bringing still more champagne glasses and yellow-flowered plates back from the house. He
saw how they smiled at one another and how the little man relaxed when the woman touched his
hand.
Which of them, he wondered, had sent for the voodoo-man?
Or woman.