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

whitewashed plaster walls, and on out into the sunlit yard. Nails, tools, seed, foreclosed from failed
businesses. Small boxes on the long sawbuck tables contained the deeds to city lots, houses, shares in
cotton-presses or sugar-mills or boats. In the yard, mules and horses, ranging from sleek bloodstock to
spent ewe-necked nags-foreclosures, probates, the breakdowns of men who'd miscalculated their
incomes or debts.
Slaves.
"Open your mouth, Deacon, let him see your teeth." Jed Burton-January recognized him as one of the St.
Mary Opera Society-waved his merchandise forward. A man in cheap homespun turned the slave in
question half-around, to get better light in his mouth while he peered and thrust his fingers inside.
Dressed up in their best, the men in jackets of blue corduroy or wool, even those who were obviously
fieldhands. The women wore dresses of bright cotton calico, chintz, or sometimes even silk, their hair
wrapped in the colorful tignons that the law required all women of color to wear. All smiling,
cheerful-looking. Nobody wants a sullen slave, and a "likely" attitude might be the difference between
working as a yardman in the city and being sent upriver to cut cane. In a corner a man with leg-shackles
on his feet and an "R" burned into his cheek clasped a woman's hands. Small children clung to their
mothers. Older children-ten and up-looked like they wished they could. But they hovered close, and
gazed up at the white men with a look in their eyes no child should even know exists. January knew
exactly the dread they felt, the dread of that first night in a strange house with no one they knew around.
Just because the law said Ten years old didn't mean that private sales weren't worked all the time for
children of six and seven and eight. Besides, the law also said Where possible.
He looked around again for Shaw. This time saw him: the Kentuckian was within a thumb's-breadth of
January's formidable height and they were generally the two tallest men in any gathering. Hands in
pockets, his battered orphan of a hat shoved onto the back of his head, Shaw looked like any small-time
teamster or cracker farmer out after a bargain. The yard was full of such, prying open the mouths of
mules or field-hands, peeking into casks of tar or nails, testing an ax-head or saw-blade from job-lots
with the edges of horny thumbs. A yard to January's left a man said, "Shuck down, honey" in drawling
flatboat English to a stout young female slave; she unbuttoned her blue-flowered frock and let it drop
around her feet, so that the man could knead her belly and pinch her breasts. Her children looked on.
"Maestro." Shaw slouched up to January and spit under the hooves of a mule held by a coffee-house
servant. "I was just fixin' to call. You all right?"
January glanced over at the buyer and the woman who had been wearing the blue-flowered dress. "A
little sick to my stomach." He reminded himself that to go over and strike the man-or even tell him to
behave like a gentleman-would be pointless. The next buyer would do precisely the same. "They told me
I'd find you here."
"For all the good it's like to do." Shaw led the way across the yard to the gate onto Rue St. Louis. "As if
anybody smugglin' in Africans behind the law's back would sell 'em in a public exchange." He jerked his
thumb toward the seller of the woman in blue, haggling now with the cracker in curious archaic French: a
little dark, thin featured man with the bump of an old break in his nose, a knife scar on his cheek, and
mustachios down past his chin. He wore a home-made shirt of the blue-and-pink weave typical of the
Acadians of the southwest parishes, his long black hair bound back like Hannibal's in a queue. "One day
I might just ask you to help me on this as well, if'n you got the stomach. I speak French right enough but
it all sounds pretty much the same to me whether a man's speakin' it like a Frenchman or like a
Spaniard."
"That's where they're smuggling them in from?" January watched the dark-mustached Acadian, the
potbellied cracker shaking his head. "Cuba?"
"Cuba, Puerto Rico. Sometimes they lands 'em at Veracruz or Matamoros an' changes the bills of ladin'.
It's all very well to outlaw importin' slaves, but as long as sellin' 'em on the open market's no crime, all
you do is drive the price up." Shaw's drawling voice was soft, but January could see the hard lines of
distaste in the corners of the man's unshaven lips. "And of course, when of Captain Chamoflet there
brings in slaves to sell, they's always Creole, born an' bred here-an' if he didn't pay their owners for 'em,