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

hat and straggling hair, his drawling river-rat English and the tobacco he spit casually on the floor-the
brother-in-arms of every Kaintuck, keelboatman, filibuster, and Yahoo that had drifted downriver to
invade what had been for so many years the haven of French civilization in the New World.
If there were a form of address less respectful than tu, January reflected, leaning back in the deceptive
goldcrusted cushions of the throne and closing his eyes, Marsan would use it to Shaw. He wondered
how soon it would occur to the French Creoles to write to the Academie Fran├зaise and ask that one be
invented.
Closing his eyes was like letting go of a rope and dropping into warm water fathoms deep. Full fathom
five thy father lies . . .
His arm throbbed, and reaction to the fray tugged him down.
Coffee, he thought. There was an urn and spirit-kettle in the green room. Probably Italian-style, strong
and bitter, but still nothing to the Algerian black mire Ayasha had made.
His beautiful Ayasha. His wicked-eyed desert afreet whose death in the cholera had sent him, in grief too
great to bear alone, from Paris back to New Orleans. Back to the only home he knew.
Two years and six months. The fifteenth of August 1832. He recalled it to the day, and each day without
her since, not yet quite a thousand of them. Beads of bloodstained jet on a string that might extend
another thirty years before he reached his allotted threescore and ten.
There had been a time when he'd wondered how to endure a single one of them.
He had endured, of course. One did. He had learned to breathe again, and learned to laugh. Even to
love-though the love he bore for the dear friend of his heart now was as different from Ayasha's as a
poppy in sunlight differs from the heavy beat of the summer ocean. But it was like learning to walk on
wooden legs after a crippling injury. He couldn't imagine ever not knowing exactly how many days had
passed.
"Let's get you home." He smelled coffee, and Hannibal's voice broke into the stillness of his thought. The
fiddler set the cup on the floor beside the throne. "You look all in."
"I'll stay."
"Shaw knows where to find you."
Behind them in the office Marsan was saying, ". . . some business with Monsieur Belaggio. I remained for
a time after rehearsal . . ."
For three and a half hours? What business couldn't wait for day?
"I think I need to speak with him tonight."
". . . shall manage somehow to be here in the morning. Never would I oblige Signor Caldwell to one day
of worry, one hour, over the obligations which we have to his opera season here in New Orleans. Evero,
I can conduct rehearsal from a chair, if I can but be borne in from my carriage . . ." Belaggio's voice
faltered artfully, like a tenor dying at the end of Act Three.
"They're going to try again, you know."
"What?" Hannibal paused in the act of collecting his long hair back into its straying pigtail.
"To kill him." January opened his eyes. "Have you read the libretto of the opera we rehearsed tonight?"
"Othello?" He thought about it, and something changed in the coffee-dark eyes. "Ah." He coughed.
"Yes."
"It's probably the most beautiful setting I've ever encountered for that play," said January quietly. "The
version Belaggio has written makes Rossini's look like a second-rate commedia at a fair. Everything
Shakespeare said, or implied, about jealousy, about passion, about the meanness of heart that cannot
abide the sight of good. . ."
"And all the audience will see," finished Hannibal, "is a black man kissing a white woman." He coughed
again, and dragged up a gilt-tasseled footstool with a kind of swift, unobtrusive urgency.
"Kissing her." January glanced back through the lighted doorway of the office, where Belaggio, forgetful
of the fatal gravity of his wound, was on his feet, declaiming the details of the fray to Shaw. "And then
murdering her out of a love too great for his heart to endure."
"Hmmm." Hannibal chewed for a time the corner of his graying mustache. Though the fiddler never spoke