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

By the light of his single taper he eased January out of the rough jacket he'd put on for the walk home,
and picked the slashed and sodden shirtsleeve away from the cut. "What bloody man is this?" he added,
dropping from French to Shakespearean English, something Hannibal did with even greater facility than
January, who was himself long used to switching from French to Spanish to English and back.
"It looks worse than it is."
"It better, or we'll be calling in the undertakers." He doused January's handkerchief in the brandy, took a
gulp from the bottle, and daubed the wound. January flinched at the sting of it. Behind them in the office,
Belaggio's groans, gasps, and accusations continued for the benefit of Madame Montero and M'sieu
Marsan. "Did you notice young Ponte changed his coat?"
"Are you sure?"
"Fairly." Hannibal tried to open the folding penknife he'd taken from his pocket, but his skeletal fingers
were unsteady; January took the knife from him, opened it, and handed it back to cut away the sleeve of
his shirt. "He and Cavallo both were wearing long-tailed coats at rehearsal, and I think they were in the
same outfits when I first saw them in the alley. Cavallo was, I know-a blue cutaway with a velvet collar."
He nodded toward Ponte, emerging from the office to hurry up the stairs. The chorus-boy's boots were
mud-splashed, January noticed, but the dove-colored trousers above them spotlessly clean. Even
Hannibal, who'd come out of the theater only in the battle's aftermath, had fresh spatters of mud on his
calves.
Working carefully, and turning aside now and then to cough, the fiddler sliced the clean lower portion of
the linen sleeve from the bloodied, and used it to form a bandage. His breath labored in the silence, but
he seemed better than he had earlier in the evening.
"You, boy." Marsan's tall form blotted out the light of the office doorway. "We need water in here to
make coffee."
Sixteen years ago, before he'd gone to Paris, it hadn't bothered January to be addressed by strangers by
the informal tu. That was just something that white men did when addressing slaves-though sixteen years
ago most French Creoles were fairly careful to use the polite vous in speaking to men they knew were
free colored, albeit they occasionally forgot and called black freedmen tu, as they would slaves, horses,
children, or dogs. In Paris, everyone had spoken to him in the polite form-vous. He'd felt a kind of elation
in it, as if it were a mark of an adulthood impossible in New Orleans. It surprised him sometimes, after
two and a half years, how much he still minded.
Sometimes it surprised and shamed him that he didn't mind more.
"M'sieu Janvier was hurt saving Signor Belaggio's life," said Hannibal, and he stood up, his hand
unobtrusively on the back of the throne for support. "I'll get the water." He picked up the single candle
and turned away toward the stairway down to the vault, where the big clay jars of drinking water stood.
He hadn't reached the stair, however, when the outer doors banged below, and lantern-light jostled over
the brick of the walls.
". . . borne them upstairs," Cavallo's voice said in his lilting English, and boots clattered, first on the soft
brick, then hollow on the wooden steps.
"Them?" The light, scratchy tone of Abishag Shaw, Lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guards, veered
skittishly between the Milanese's faulty pronunciation of a French plural subjunctive and his own
idiosyncratic comprehension of the language.
As two blue-uniformed Guards, Shaw in his stained and sorry green coat, and Cavallo came into view,
Hannibal explained. "Signorina d'Isola was overcome by the sight of the blood-" He switched from
French to the Spanish that he was fairly certain only January would understand, and added, "-and I
daresay by the spectacle of someone other than herself holding center stage." He dropped back into
French again to include the handsome young tenor and the guards. "M'sieu Janvier was injured, too, but
not badly. Coffee for everyone?"
He rattled down the steps to fetch the water, coatskirts billowing around him, like an underfed and
slightly pixilated grasshopper. January carefully kept himself from smiling at the expression of alarm that
flashed across Marsan's face at the prospect of sharing refreshment with one who was-by his slouched