"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 5 - Die Upon A Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

the trough behind the cabin that two families shared: every morning a different tune. Some were those
African tunes men sang in the fields, songs whose meaning had been lost over the years but whose
haunting melodies still moved the heart and the bones. Some were the bird-bright cotillions heard once or
twice, when the Master had company at the big house and folks would loiter in the yard to listen to the
fiddle played within. January's father could whistle a tune back after hearing it once. When January grew
older-freed by his mother's new master and given proper piano lessons in the light-handed Austrian mode
from an emigre-he was astonished at how many of those tunes he instantly recognized.
What would Antonio Vivaldi have thought had he known that his "Storm at Sea" concerto would be
whistled by a tall black man with tribal scars on his face, walking out to the sugar-harvest with his
cane-knife in his hand?
Why this should return to January's mind as he entered the New Exchange Coffee House on Rue
Chartres slightly before noon the following day he wasn't sure. Perhaps because he'd learned to look at
music as a sort of armature, a core or frame of reference around which other perceptions of the world
were built. Perhaps because he knew, after playing the piano for a thousand dances and ten thousand
lessons, how music can slip past the guards that the mind puts on itself, how it can alter the shape of
thought before the thinker is aware of the change.
Else why the anger over Beethoven's symphonies? Why the riots over Fidelio, whose young lovers
weren't intriguers tricking an old husband or doting father, but patriots standing forth against tyranny?
Why in Milan and Parma and Venice could one be arrested for whistling the barcarole from La Muette
de Portici: My friends, the dawn is fair ... ?
It was only a tale of events centuries old, after all. Words were dangerous enough. In most of the United
States it was now forbidden to teach slaves to read since the big slave revolts of 1828 and 1831. But
music gave words power. Music made them memorable. Burned them like the R brand for Runaway,
into the flesh of the heart. Thus it was that though January woke with his cut arm hurting so badly that he
had to tie it into a makeshift sling in order to walk, he dressed and made his way to the headquarters of
the City Guard in the Cabildo, in quest of Abishag Shaw.
And the men at the Cabildo directed him here. January hated the New Exchange.
As the brightly painted sign above its doors proclaimed, the front room was a coffee-house. The velvet
aroma of the beans as they were roasted competed pleas antly in the dim spaces of vaulted plaster with
the stinks of hair pomade, sweaty wool, cigar smoke, and the comprehensively uncleaned gutters of the
Rue Chartres. January stepped through the tall French doors that lined two walls and searched for sight
of Shaw among the men clustered on the backless benches, the rush-bottomed chairs around trestle
tables. Well-dressed men for the most part, muttering in low voices and scratching figures in
memorandum-books. Sober coats of brown or blue-Carnival did not penetrate to the New Exchange.
Over in the corner a flash of delicate sky-blue announced Vincent Marsan's exquisite presence.
High-crowned hats of beaver or beaverette or of the more modern silk. Chiefly white men, though
January recognized Artemus Tourneval, a well-off free contractor of color, and noted another immaculate
gentleman picking his way among the tables who, though nearly as light as some of the Neapolitans and
Sicilians in the opera chorus, definitely had African ancestors as well as white.
Neither Tourneval nor this other man-probably a planter come to town from the Cane River
countrymade any.move to sit down. Nor would they have been served if they had, even if only with each
other. When they spoke to the white men-as they did, dickering and figuring and speculating about
interest and credit-both remained on their feet, while the white men sat, and neither looked the white men
in the eye.
January wondered dourly if they were addressed as vous or tu.
The only other men in the room of African descent were the waiters, and an occasional porter from the
yard beyond. Neither Tourneval nor the colored planter gave them a glance.
When one aspires to mastery, one does not acknowledge cousinship with slaves.
Tu, thought January. Beyond a doubt.
In the big back room the auction hadn't yet begun. Kegs, bales, boxes, were stacked around the