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

They had had much to talk about. The others ...
January wrapped Belaggio's shuddering bulk in a kingly cloak of beggar's velvet and dyed rabbit-fur
someone handed him, and tallied the faces in the candle-light.
Hannibal Sefton's presence, if unexplained, at least wasn't sinister. January had known the fiddler for two
and a half years now and knew the man didn't have a violent bone in his opium-laced body. Through the
evening's rehearsal, as he'd sat at the piano, January had heard Hannibal's stifled coughing behind him,
and whenever he turned, it had been to see his friend's thin face white and set with pain. As usual when
his consumption bore hard on him, Hannibal had taken refuge in laudanum to get him through rehearsal,
and January guessed, by the creases in his rusty black coat and the way his graying hair straggled loose
over his back from its old-fashioned queue, that he'd simply fallen asleep afterward in a corner of the
green room. How he managed to play as beautifully as he did under the circumstances was something
January had yet to figure out, but that was the only mystery about Hannibal.
The presence of the others was less easily accounted for.
Drusilla d'Isola, girlishly slim and frail-looking, he knew to be Belaggio's mistress, and it didn't take much
guessing to place her there. Her dressing-room was on the second floor above the rehearsal-room and
offices. According to company gossip, it included a daybed among its lavish amenities, as well as gas
lighting-the only dressing-room so supplied-a gilt-footed bath-tub, a coffee-urn, a French armoire painted
with cupids, and even a small dining table. Her hair, the color of refined molasses, was no longer in the
elaborately upswept Psyche knot in which it had been dressed at rehearsal, and January could tell by the
fit of her plum-colored moire dress that it had been laced hastily-probably by herself-and that she wore
neither corset nor petticoats beneath.
Consuela Montero's raven hair was dressed, shining with an unbroken pomaded luster in its fantasia of
loops, tulle bows, and blood-red ostrich-tips, and the crimson gown that made her creamy skin glow
almost golden was laced and trussed as only a maidservant's attentions could make it. The soprano had
protuberant brown eyes that reminded January of a wild horse ready to kick or bite or bolt. At the
moment she was regarding La d'Isola with undisguised contempt as the prima donna emerged with
fluttering eyelids from her swoon.
"Are you all right?" Monsieur Marsan tenderly stroked d'Isolas wrists. Even his stickpin matched, an
amethyst like a pale iris's heart set in a twilight-hued cravat.
"M'sieu, the brandy, if you would. . ."
January passed the brandy back to Hannibal, who took another gulp before returning it to Marsan. "It is
not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door," observed the fiddler, leaning over January's
shoulder as January checked Belaggio's hammering pulse. Fortunately he spoke English, since the wound
so described in Romeo and Juliet had proved fatal and Belaggio was making a sufficiently Senecan
tragedy of his injury as it was. "Shall I get more blankets, or shall we move him-them"-he glanced back at
La d'Isola, whom Monsieur Marsan had wrapped in his coat "upstairs, where it's warmer?"
"By all means." Marsan lifted the prima soprano as if she were a doll; La d'Isola sagged gracefully back
so that her head hung over his elbow, her hair a rippling curtain halfway to the floor. January had seen her
take the identical pose earlier that evening in the first rehearsal of Othello, when Staranzano the baritone
bore her to the bed.
Marsan's dandyish ensemble had caught January's eye at rehearsal, added to the fact that he'd sat apart
from the other members of the newly-founded St. Mary Opera So ciety. That separation, at least, was
now made clearJanuary wondered how it came about that a Creole Frenchman was a member of the
Society at all. As a rule, the French Creoles who owned most of the plantations and who still controlled
the money and power in the city avoided the newly-come, newly-wealthy Americans, treating even the
representatives of the best families of New York, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston as if they were
tobacco-spitting filibusters straight off the keelboats.
This antipathy was in fact the genesis of the St. Mary Opera Society. The money contributed by the
wealthy inhabitants of that new upriver American suburb was what enabled James Caldwell to go to
Havana and enlist Belaggio, to bring to New Orleans a company which sang in the sweetly musical Italian