Barbara Hambly - Libre

VIP免费

2024-11-25 0 0 40.63KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

LIBRE

by Barbara Hambly

* * * *

[Insert Pic EQMM1106Stories02.jpg Here]

Art by David Sullivan

* * * *

Barbara Hambly lived in New Orleans for three years with her late husband,

science fiction writer George Alec Effinger. The city provides the setting for

her crime fiction, the pre-Civil War Benjamin January series. What better

way to begin a journey through time and the New Orleans of mystery-writing

imagination than with a tale of January, former slave and sometime sleuth.

Ms. Hambly’s new novel is Renfield, Slave of Dracula.

“If they fear she has been kidnapped, why not call the City Guard?” Benjamin

January paused on the steps that led up to the gallery of the garçonnière, looking

down at his mother in the narrow yard. He’d just returned from teaching his first

piano class of the winter—new students, Americans, in the suburb of St. Mary

upriver—and had been hoping to get a few hours’ nap before he had to dress up

again and play for a subscription ball over on Rue Orleans. There was a saying

among the musicians of New Orleans, You can sleep during Lent—which wasn’t

entirely true because the holy season was dotted with “exceptions,” like

Washington’s Birthday balls—but the week or two after the first frost were always

the worst. He’d played for the opening of the French Opera House last night, and

had gone on to provide quadrilles and pantaleones at a ball at the townhouse of a

wealthy sugar planter. The sellers of fresh milk and crayfish had been beginning their

morning rounds when he’d finally returned to his room above his mother’s kitchen.

Afternoon coffee with his mother’s friends was not something he wanted to

deal with on three hours of sleep, particularly not when his mother had that glint in

her eye.

“The City Guard.” Livia Lev-esque sniffed. “You know what they are, my

son. If a slave disappears they’ll sober up and hunt for the thief because the owner

will give them a reward. If a libre disappears—” She used the Spanish term for their

people, the free people of color, though Louisiana hadn’t been a possession of

Spain for thirty years now. “—they have other things to do. You come downstairs

now, Ben. Poor Madame Rochier is nearly mad with fear and grief.”

That his mother was up to something—that there was something about the

disappearance of eighteen-year-old Marie-Zulieka Rochier that she wasn’t going to

admit in her first preemptory demand that he undertake the search—January guessed

from his mother’s tone, and the way she held her head. He was forty-one, and had

consciously noticed before the age of four—when she and he and his younger sister

Olympe had all still been slaves on a sugar plantation upriver—all the signs when she

was doctoring some unpalatable truth.

When he followed her into the dining room of the trim little cottage on Rue

Burgundy he was sure of it.

Casmalia Rochier was certainly afraid, and certainly upset. But in her dark

eyes and in the set of her perfect mouth, as she turned her head to reply to a

question, was a world of suspicion and frozen rage.

Like January’s mother—like the other four women sipping his mother’s

cook’s excellent coffee around the cherrywood table—Casmalia Rochier was a

plaçee, the free colored mistress of a wealthy white man. Many years ago, according

to custom, banker Louis Rochier had bought her a house and settled on her the

income to raise their mixed-race children in comfort and safety. A similar

arrangement between January’s mother and St-Denis Janvier, now long gathered to

his ancestors, had paid for both the music lessons that led to his current profession

and the medical training in France that had proved to be so completely useless the

moment he returned to the United States ... and, of course, had paid for this house.

A similar arrangement existed between January’s youngest sister

Dominique—currently passing Casmalia the sugar—and a young sugar planter;

between his old friend Catherine Clisson, who smiled a welcome to him as he came

into the room, and another equally wealthy planter. An arrangement like that had

provided the foundation of Bernadette Métoyer’s chocolate shop and the

investments that paid for the gowns of the four daughters Agnes Pellicot was trying

to “place” in arrangements of their own. Bernadette and Agnes were both angrily

denouncing the New Orleans City Guards to Casmalia and barely glanced at January,

but Dominique got to her feet and rustled to the sideboard for another cup of coffee

for her older brother:

“You are going to find Zozo for us, aren’t you, p’tit?”

He was almost twenty years the elder and six feet, three inches tall, and smiled

inwardly at being called “little one” by this piece of graceful fluff.

“If I can. Have you notified the City Guards?” He looked across at Casmalia

Rochier, and her eyes ducked away from his. “They may display little interest in

recovering artisans’ wives or market girls when they go missing, but they’re going to

look for the daughter of Louis Rochier, even one born on the shady side of the

street.”

He didn’t add, And what’s more, you know it. But it was in his eyes when she

looked back at him. What is it you all aren’t telling me?

“My mother tells me Marie-Zulieka disappeared this morning. When? How?

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Barbara Hambly - Libre.pdf

共18页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Barbara Hambly - Libre

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: