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

unreasoning hate showed through his brooding self-control.
"Sneaking bastards. They know what my land means to me." He puffed his cigar like a caged
dragon blowing smoke. "They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that
lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and
they know the land is my body and my life. I've done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and
harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It's the one true
good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They're spiteful as
women, the whole family is," he added. "They'd be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my
own field hands to turn against me.
"That's what I want you to find out."
He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him-stood as if this man were still
his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in
July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family
again.
Heat blossomed somewhere behind January's sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and
dangerously still. He'd set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the
backyard-yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother's
house. Neither he nor Olympe-his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never
spoke-had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.
With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise,
most of January's piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of
New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He'd just returned from a house in the suburb of
St. Mary's-quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur's cane-fields had lain-after talking to a woman
about lessons for her son. That angelic sixyear-old had announced, the moment January was on
the opposite side of the parlor's sliding doors again, "Mama, he's a nigger!" in tones of
incredulous shock.
Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?
Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned
the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several
degrees more correct than Fourchet's Creole sloppiness, he said, "In other words, sir, what you
want is a spy."
"Of course I want a spy!" Fourchet's eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite.
His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. "No question
it's the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it.
This Shaw fellow I spoke with yesterday said you'd be the man."
"I'm afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir." January fought to keep his voice from shaking. "I'm a
surgeon by training, and a musician. I've looked into things when friends of mine needed help.
But I'm not a spy."
"I'll pay you," said Fourchet. "Five hundred dollars. You can't tell me you'd make as much
between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls." He nodded toward the piano in the
front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored
children, the sons and daughters of white men by their pla├зees.
"I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money," put in Livia.
January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want-not NEED-
the money. But his mother didn't even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in
charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he'd
occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.
That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and,
returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came
down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and