"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

self-consciousness, or anger in the presence of her former master.
The situation simply didn't bother her at all. "Monsieur Fourchet has come to ask our help, Ben,"
said his mother. Outside, in the Rue Burgundy, a brewer's dray rattled past, driven far too fast by
a young man standing to the reins like a Roman charioteer; two women walking along the brick
banquette squealed and sprang aside from the water thrown by the wheels. Even so far back from
the levee the hoots of the steamboats could be heard, and the dim stirring of stevedores' shouts
and vendors' cries. After summer's gluey horror, the autumn air was crisp. The city was resuming
its wintertime bustle and prosperity. "Your name was given him by that dirty American
policeman you take up with, but perhaps it's all to the best."
That dirty American policeman was Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guard.
Though as a rule-like most of the citizens of the French town, white and colored alike- January
mistrusted Americans profoundly, particularly those in positions of power, he liked Shaw and
respected him. Still, his mother spoke no more than the truth.
January folded his powerful arms and waited. He had not, he noticed, been invited to sit in the
presence of a white man and his former master. Nor had his mother said, Get yourself some
coffee, Ben.
It was one thing for a white man to share coffee with a velvet-brown mulatto woman. White men
did it all the time, in these small cottages at the rear of the French town. The custom of the
country. For generations French and Spanish Creoles had taken free women of color as their
mistresses, as St.-Denis Janvier had thirty-three years ago freed and then taken her. It was another
thing January could see this in her eyes, hear it in her artfully artless silence-to ask a white
gentleman to sit in the same room drinking coffee with the coal-black son of a mulatto and a
slave.
In the eighteen months since his return from sixteen years in Paris-years in which he had
practiced both surgery and music-January had never been permitted to forget that this house was
his mother's, not his.
If Simon Fourchet was conscious of any of this, he didn't show it. Maybe he accepted it as natural
that a grown man wouldn't be permitted to drink coffee in the house where he lived, should a
white man be seated there.
"There's a secret campaign of deliberate destruction going on at Mon Triomphe," the planter said,
glancing up at January from under the grizzled overhang of his brows. "Spoliation, arson,
wrecking, ruin-and murder. And maybe open revolt."
Mon Triomphe, January recalled, was Fourchet's other plantation. When Fourchet had sold
Bellefleur-years after January, his mother, and his younger sister had been sold and freed-the
planter had gone there permanently. It lay upriver in Ascension Parish, some twenty miles
southeast of Baton Rouge. Twenty miles, that is, if you wanted to hack your way through cypress
swamps and untamed woodland, instead of journeying twice the distance in half the time via
steamboat on the river.
Forty-two years ago-in 1793, the year of January's birth-Fourchet had managed Mon Triomphe
himself and left Bellefleur in the care of his brother-in-law Gervase Duhamel, only returning
there after the grueling hell of the roulaison-the sugar-grinding-was done. Bellefleur had lain
close to the small, walled city of New Orleans, to which Fourchet brought his Spanish wife and
their two children every year for the Carnival season. They lived in the big house at Bellefleur for
the weeks between Twelfth Night and Easter; entertained guests there, something impossible in
the isolated fastnesses of Ascension Parish. St.-Denis Janvier, who had eventually bought
January's mother, had been one of those guests.
In 1798, when January was five, there'd been a slave revolt on Mon Triomphe. It may have been
fueled by rumor, hope, and the example of Christophe's rebellion in the island of Saint-
Domingue, though the aunts and uncles and cousins whose cabins January had played in said that
it started when a drunken Fourchet beat a young girl to death. Fourchet's wife and daughter died