Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave

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Benjamin January
Book 6
Wet Grave
Barbara Hambly
For Jill and Charles
Special thanks are due to Pamela Arceneaux and all the staf F of the Historic New Orleans
Collection; to Andy and Sue Galliano: to Jessica Harris; to Mary-Lynne and Lou Costa; to all the
folks at Le Monde Creole and at Lucullus; Kate Miciak and Kathleen Baldonado of Bantam
Books; and to all my friends for their patience with me.
ONE
The only time Benjamin January ever actually exchanged words with Hesione LeGros was when
they were both hiding behind a piano in a New Orleans hotel hoping they wouldn't be massacred
by pirates.
It wasn't a long conversation.
She said, "I'm gonna shoot that fuckin' man of mine for this."
And January-who had just turned nineteen and was hoping to make twenty-replied, "What makes
you think any of us will live to see you do that?"
As it happened, someone else shot her man a number of years later in the Yucatan, but at the time
January hoped that the dark-eyed little African Venus beside him would have that honor, and
fairly soon. The man certainly deserved it.
The whole debacle began, tamely enough, with the arrival in New Orleans of Major-General Jean
Robert Marie Humbert, formerly of the Grand Army of Napoleon. Humbert, in that year of 1812,
was avoiding Napoleon's various domains because of opinions he'd rashly expressed after the
Little Emperor had relieved him of command. Some said this was because Humbert's army had
ignominiously failed to re-conquer the island of Saint-Domingue from rebelling slaves. But
January's mother-a clearinghouse for gossip concerning both the white and the free colored
communities in New Orleans-was of the opinion that Humbert's affair with Napoleon's sister had
something to do with it.
"Though I don't see why Napoleon should cut up stiff over Humbert," Livia Janvier had added,
pinning an aigrette of diamonds to the confection of rose-colored silk and plumes that covered
her hair. She studied the result critically in the mirror. "The woman's slept with his entire general
staff, most of his marshals, and is now working her way down through the colonels. I can't
imagine how she keeps their names straight when she encounters them at military reviews."
She propped an elbow on the dressing-table and held up her hand peremptorily for her maid,
who'd been gently dusting talcum powder into the fingers of a pair of long white kid gloves. Livia
Janvier didn't even glance at the maid as the young woman set to work easing and moulding the
soft, close-fitting leather over her mistress' knuckles and palm. When January's mother was
dressing to meet her protector-the man who had bought her and her two small children from
slavery eleven years previously-she displayed a meticulous patience, a concentration like an
artist's that January found fascinating to watch. "Don't you stay out late after you get done
playing tonight, p'tit," she added. "And make sure that M'sieu Davis pays you. Promises are
cheap."
It went without saying that January's mother, slender as a bronze lily at the age of thirty-six,
would not give her son so much as a nod when they separately reached the Marine Hotel. January
would be present at General Humbert's birthday dinner strictly as a hired musician, a profession
he'd worked at since the age of sixteen concurrent with such medical studies as were available to
a young free man of color in that time and place. St.-Denis Janvier, his mother's protector, was
one of the guests, a select gang of the wealthier businessmen of the town assembled to honor the
elderly war-horse. Most of them would be accompanied by their mistresses. It was not the sort of
party to which one brought one's wife.
And Livia Janvier-she'd taken her protector's name, as many free colored plaçees did-wasn't the
sort of woman who'd admit to being the mother of one of the musicians.
This would have been true even if her son hadn't been all of nineteen years old, six feet three
inches tall, and very obviously the offspring of an African rather than a white man. As the guests
came into the hotel's dining-room that night, to the bright strains of a Mozart overture, it was St.-
Denis Janvier, and not Livia, who caught January's eye and smiled.
January knew most of the other guests by sight. In 1812, New Orleans wasn't that big a town. The
women present were mostly friends, or enemies, of his mother.
These ladies of the free colored demimonde were by and large plaçees-placed with a single
protector, though one lady he recognized as a highly-paid courtesan. About half the men were
businessmen and planters: he noted the tall, powerful form of Jean Blanque the banker, whose
name graced nearly every financial transaction in the town and whose young and beautiful wife
(not present) was the daughter of Barthelmy de McCarry, brother of the wealthiest planter in the
district. De McCarty came in just behind Blanque, joking with his brother Jean Baptiste. Both of
their mistresses, exquisitely-gowned women of color, wore silk tignons-headscarves-that were
plumed and jeweled mockeries of the law that forbade women of African ancestry, slave or free,
to go about in public with uncovered hair.
Bernard Marigny was there, a lively little French Creole planter notorious for his gambling and
his duels. As he came in he was laughing over something with a tall, black-clad gentleman whom
January recognized as Jean Lafitte.
If you wanted anything in New Orleans, duty-free or difficult to obtain, you could probably get it
through Jean Lafitte. Four years previously, when it became illegal to im port slaves into United
States Territory, Lafitte had surfaced, lounging around the blacksmith shop he and his brother
owned on Rue Bourbon or drinking with businessmen and planters in the Cafe Tremoulet.
Somehow, the handsome young Gascon always had a slave or two to sell. Of course these slaves
were always warranted born in American territory. Of course the sales were private, between
gentlemen, nothing on the open market. Lafitte sold brandies, too, and fine French silks.... In fact,
anything you might want.
And cheaply, as if United States customs duties did not exist.
Though Lafitte didn't have a mistress with him, he didn't arrive at the birthday dinner alone. In
addition to Marigny-who was friends with everyone in town except his own wife-Lafitte entered
with his usual coterie of "friends": a planter named Huette, who had a place on Bayou St. John
where boats could be landed that came off the lake; the fair-haired Pierre Lafitte, his newest
mistress on his arm; a dark little man named Laporte who kept the books for the Lafitte brothers;
and Jean Baptiste Sauvinet, one of the most prominent bankers of the town. Lafitte moved in the
highest circles of French Creole society, among the men, at least.
There were others, less respectable, whom January had seen only at a distance in the cafes and
the market. The fierce and jovial sea-captain Dominic Youx. Cut-Nose Chighizola, whose face
was a mass of scars-at the moment he was explaining in voluminous Italian-accented French to a
planter named St. Geme how he'd lost his nose in battle against the Spanish. The dark and sinister
Captain Beluche, of the "Bolivian" privateer vessel Spy. Vincente Gambi, another Italian, strode
along on the outskirts of the group, glancing at the silverware and the cut-crystal pitchers on the
tables as if calculating their worth. He had, January noticed, what looked like a couple of fresh
cuts on his face, superficial but adding to his appearance of coarse menace.
The plaçees of these "friends" drifted behind them, gowned in silks and chattering among
themselves. They were less fashionable, more sumptuous, and far more heavily jeweled than their
town counterparts. Down on Grand Terre, where Lafitte had his headquarters these days, the free
colored ladies lived with their men openly, as wives, instead of keeping separate establishments
as the town plaçees did. January noticed that his mother and her friends kept their distance from
them, not in open enmity, but with a cool politeness that spoke volumes for what was going to be
said about their dress, speech, and taste in ornamentation over chicory-laced coffee the following
morning.
Hesione LeGros was one of these Grand Terre ladies. January noticed her because she was one of
the youngest, probably his own age, and also one of the darkest. Among the free colored
community, as among the whites, dark skin and African features were not admired. January had
grown up with the knowledge that his own huge size and African blackness were a reminder of
the slave father whose name his mother never spoke, and this knowledge was ground in upon him
every time any stranger, white or colored, heard the delicate strength of his piano-playing and
looked astonished.
From the first time he'd played a recital, he'd been aware that they would not have looked so
surprised if he were fair-skinned or white.
Most of the plaçees were quadroon or octoroon, complexions shaded anywhere from soft matte
walnut to the hue of very old ivory. A few, like his mother, were mulatto, of African mothers and
white fathers. The wealthiest businessmen of the town favored the lightest-skinned women:
fairness itself was a commodity. Hesione-though January didn't learn her name until years later-
was richly dark. Unlike most of the others she pointed up undeniably African features by wearing
a gold silk gown so vibrant it bordered on rust, a color no white woman would have dared to put
on. A necklace of topaz and citrine ringed her throat like a collar of fire, and plumes dyed gold
and black blossomed above her tignon. As January played-Mozart rondos and snippets of
Rossini, light-handed on the five-octave Erard in the corner of the Marine Hotel's dining-room-he
looked out over the jostle of heads and backs and saw that nodding explosion of sable and flame,
like the single oak on a little island in a marsh.
The tables were set out in the old-fashioned French manner, sparkling with the hotel's very fine
silver and Limoges-ware dishes. Oysters in lemon, gumbo of shrimp, Italian pates and vol-au-
vents; artichokes and turkey-poults and turtle roasted en croute. As the hotel servants went
around with the wine-which the new owner, Mr. Davis, bought from Lafitte at a substantial
discount-the conversation grew louder. The bankers speculated as to what full statehood in the
United States was going to mean now to Louisiana and freely slandered the new Governor
Claiborne and all his works. The planters cursed what the war between the Allies and France was
doing to sugar prices. January heard for the first time about the sinking-by pirates-of the
American brig Independence, a subject brought up by a pink-faced British planter named Trulove
and hushed at once by Jean Blanque: "The less said of that," the banker murmured with a glance
toward the table of Lafitte and his cronies, "the better for all it will be." News had reached New
Orleans only that day of the Independence's destruction, brought by a man named Williams, the
sole survivor of the massacre.
"What I want to know, is," persisted Trulove, who like everyone else in the room was fairly
drunk, "what was a dashed Massachusetts merchantman carrying from Africa to Cuba in the first
place, eh? Dashed Americans complain about Lafitte and his men smuggling slaves in through
the Barataria marshes, and what are they buying along the coast of Africa, eh? Bananas? Tell me
that!"
"I shall tell you nothing of the kind," replied Blanque gently, laying a restraining hand on the
young Englishman's arm. He hadn't anything to worry about, really, for Lafitte and his men were
roaring with laughter over Dominic Youx's tale of the Bishop of Cartagena and a shipload of
whores from Port-au-Prince. January let his hands float from song to song, alternating popular
overtures and opera-tunes with the quadrilles and cotillions that he'd play when hired by the
wealthy for balls. Though he was studying medicine with a surgeon named Gomez, he had
always loved music, and St.-Denis Janvier had paid for him to be taught by one of the best
instructors in town. That instructor, an emigre Austrian named Kovald, was only lately dead.
January played the antiquated airs of Pachelbel and Purcell that the grim old musician had loved,
sadness in his heart that his teacher had not lived to return to Vienna. Had not lived to see
Napoleon defeated and cast out, as he must, January believed, one day be.
With the after-dinner cognac came the cigars, the ribald laughter, the sly jests. In short order there
would be trouble. For twenty-two years France had been torn by vio lence, Europe subjected to
bloodletting and fire. There were men in the room whose fathers had been beheaded in the name
of the French Republic, whose family fortunes were destroyed by the Revolution and by the
Emperor who had climbed to power in the wake of chaos. Any minute now, he thought, someone
was going to say regicide or Corsican upstart-or accuse someone of having the manners of an
American.... January knew the signs.
"Now that Bolivar's in in the south, the whole Spanish empire's going to crumble," prophesied
Joffrey Duquille. He was a big, robust, saturnine planter, with the obligatory reputation as a
womanizer and a duelist. "A man can get letters of marque in Cartagena, and go after anything
flying the Spanish flag......
"Lafitte should have known better than to go after an American ship, slaver or no slaver. . . ."
The air condensed to a golden roux of wine and food and pomade; the candles in the wall-sconces
burned low, and the crystal-hung chandeliers dripped wax onto the tablecloths. The great dining-
room seemed stuffy and close. A servant opened the long windows that looked down onto Rue
Chartres and January slid into "Childgrove," a country-dance tune that could be endlessly
embroidered. His mother, at Blanque's table with St.-Denis Janvier; flipped open her sandalwood
fan and looked down her nose as Cut-Nose Chighizolas mistress took the scarfaced privateer's
pipe from his mouth and blew a cloud of smoke herself. Chighizola gestured extravagantly, and
shouted to Hesione LeGros how he'd lost his nose escaping from an Algerian dungeon....
Talk pattered on all sides, like summer rain.
"Shut up, you fool, he'd never have done something that damn-fool stupid! Sink an American
ship? He knows what side the bread's buttered on. . . ."
"It's all Spanish prizes of war, after all..."
". : . a giant black, six, seven feet tall and as wide as a door, coming down upon me with a battle-
ax..."
". . . pegged the interest at ten percent, plus an additional two percent the first two years......
The voices were getting louder. The Italian captain, Gambi, announced into a momentary hush,
"Privateer this and privateer that, bah! Like there was any disgrace in be ing a pirate! Pirate is
what I am and I don't care who knows it! Nobody tells me who I'll sink and who I'll spare!"
"I hear there's a new cargo come in down at Big Temple...." St. Geme's voice determinedly
overrode Gambi's.
"Hardly pays to go down there anymore," remarked de McCarty with a laugh, "now that Lafitte's
got a shop on Royal Street as well,"
"Still, you get the best; going down there, or to Grand Terre. Used to be you'd have to deal with
this smuggler or that smuggler, and run all over town trying to get the best deal. I will say for
Lafitte, he organized them all under one leader. .....
"Like the American Washington?"
"A toast." Blanque got to his feet, wineglass lifted so that the topaz liquid caught the molten
hundredfold amber of the candlelight. January ruffled a little fanfare borrowed from Rossini, then
stilled his hands on the keys. Just as well, he thought. The piano was going out of tune anyway.
These little square ones did that in the damp of New Orleans. "To our guest of honor."
In his big chair at the head table, General Humbert half-rose, creaking a little in his blue uniform,
and inclined his graying head.
"A man whose victories in the field put such amateurs as this American Washington to shame. A
man who truly knows the face of war; who has carried the war against England onto their own
conquered soil in blood-soaked Ireland; whose boldness in the attack at Landau is legendary;
whose courage and intrepidity were key elements in the pacification of uprisings in the vendee. A
true soldier, a true warrior, whose vocation has been the sword and whose duties he has always
acquitted with honor and dignity...."
Perhaps because he was taller than any man presentor maybe only because some of the
banqueters had shifted their chairs a little January could watch the General's face in the
candlelight as Blanque spoke. And from a drunkard's fatuous smile, he watched the man's
expression change. He's drunk himself sad, January thought. Or drunk himself philosophical,
which is worse. . . .
". . . carried the banner of the Republic against all odds, caring nothing for his own safety; caring
nothing for the politics and the quibblings of politicians. . . ."
Slowly, Humbert surveyed the room, and with a flash of insight January guessed what he saw. In
New Orleans, this was the top level of society. Perhaps not the highest born, but the wealthiest,
the men who moved events in the town. But even as young as he was, he'd seen how the
Frenchmen of France regarded their Creole French cousins, when they came to balls. He was
familiar with that polite expression that said, This is all very well for the New World, but in
PARIS.. .
He could almost see General Humbert asking himself, Who are these people? Is this what I have
come down to? In Paris, thought January, this graying old lion would have been entertained by
his brothers of the regiment, most of whom, despite the Revolution, had some trickle of noble
blood in their veins. Not by bankers who financed shady deals in Indian land and smuggled
slaves. Certainly not by a raffish gang of privateers who ran in goods for illicit sale.
"Let those who wish to, speak of armies and of supplylines!" Blanque, clearly a cognac or two
beyond the frontier of careful thought, had fallen under the spell of his own or atory. "It is
personal courage, personal command, which broke the rabble in the vendee. It was the sheer
bravery, the audacity, of the commander, which delivered victory to the Republic's banners at
Landau-"
"Enough!" With a crash the armchair at the head table was flung back. Humbert stood swaying
on his feet, face crimson, eyes blazing in the candles' liquid glow. "Enough of this praise! Your
words remind me of what I was-of what I am. And I will not remain here as an associate of
outlaws and pirates!"
Captain Beluche, also an alumnus of Napoleon's army, lurched to his feet. "Pirates, is it?"
"Pirates!" bellowed Humbert, who had never liked Beluche. "Call yourselves what you will, and
fly what flag you find it convenient to buy, what are you but thieves who take the goods of other
men and sell them as your own? You, who only yesterday sent an American ship to the bottom
without a thought, without a blink-yes, and paraded yourselves the next day in full view of the
town, like whores, like dogs!" His hand smote the table with a noise like a gunshot, making all
the tableware jump. "I spit upon such men as you!"
This was the point at which January went behind the piano. Even Captain Gambi, who generally
didn't care who called him a pirate, was on his feet with a table-knife in his hand, screaming "Pig
of a Frenchman!" and Beluche started straight over the table that separated him from Humbert,
cutlass drawn-God knew where he'd had it during dinner-and nearly foaming at the mouth with
rage and alcohol. Men yelled something about the Independence; women screamed. Hesione
LeGros, quicker thinking than most, plunged behind the piano, all her black-and-gold plumes
askew, cursing at whichever of the several captains was her protector at the moment, and pulling
from her tignon a very long and very businesslike stiletto. Her face was calm, her rosebud mouth
almost smiling January noticed she had a small mole in one corner, like a beauty-patch. The other
Grand Terre girls clumped like scared sheep in the corner and shrieked like parrots in a storm,
and January's mother, a chunk of sugar halfway to her coffee-cup, regarded the whole eruption
with an expression of disapproval and disgust and didn't stir from her chair.
As it happened, Livia was the only person in the room who had an accurate estimate of Jean
Lafitte's presence of mind and power over his men. The smuggler-boss was on his feet-without
toppling his chair-and across the dining-room in three long strides, outstripping even Captain
Beluche, who had a few yards' lead on him. Reaching Humbert's side, Lafitte held up his hand-
with no appearance of hurry, or of fear. It was how January remembered him best, in later years:
a tall, black-haired man in a black long-tailed coat, hand upraised, the other hand resting gently
on the furious old general's shoulder. As if to say to both Humbert and the enraged and
thoroughly inebriated corsairs, Let's all be quiet and think for a moment before this goes too far.
Humbert turned to him and burst into tears, laying his head on Lafitte's shoulder.
And as gently as if he had been the old man's son, Jean Lafitte led General Humbert from the
room.
Slightly more than two years later, when the British attempted to seize and hold New Orleans as
part of their long struggle against Napoleon, Jean Lafitte-rather to everyone's surprise-turned
down a cash offer from the British General Pakenham and volunteered his services to the
American forces under General Jackson instead. Benjamin January, twenty-one by then and as
well trained a surgeon as was possible for a young man of color to be in New Orleans, fought in
the free colored militia in the ensuing battle. Though the Americans won-and the British ceased
boarding and seizing the crews of American vessels-it was still several years before either he or
St.-Denis Janvier deemed it safe for him to risk a sea journey to France to continue his medical
studies.
He was in France for sixteen years. For the first six of those years he studied medicine, and
worked as a junior surgeon, at the Hotel Dieu. St.-Denis Janvier died in 1822, but the little money
he left his plaçee's son would not stretch to cover the expenses of buying a practice. Moreover, it
was quite clear to January by then that even in the land of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, no
white man was going to hire a black surgeon to cut him open if he could find a man of his own
color to do it instead. January tried not to be troubled by this, accepting it as he'd accepted the
fact that in his former home he'd had to step off the banquette to let white men pass....
And then he'd met Ayasha. And understood that if he wanted to marry this very young and very
competent Berber dressmaker-at eighteen she had her own shop, her own small clientele, and
looked like a desert witch inexplicably trying to pass herself off as a Parisian artisan-he'd need
money.
That was when, and why, he went back to music.
For ten years he played for the Opera, for the balls and parties of the restored nobility who'd
returned to Paris in the wake of Louis XVIII and of the wealthy who'd founded their fortunes on
the wreck of Napoleon's empire. For ten years he and Ayasha lived in happiness in a little flat on
the Rue de fAube near the river. In the newspapers he followed the careers of Lafitte, and
Humbert, and those privateer captains who'd once had their fortified camp on Grand Terre. His
account of General Humbert's birthday dinner became an after-dinner tale for his musician
friends, when Humbert became Commodore of the Navy of Mexico, or when word got out
concerning Dominic Youx's participation in the plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and
spirit him away to live out his days in a comfortable town house in New Orleans.
The American Navy ran Jean Lafitte out of his new headquarters on the Texas coast in 1821.
Rumors swirled about what became of him, but no one knew for sure. Rene Beluche became the
Commodore of the new nation of Venezuela. Vincente Gambi, and Antonino Angelo, and
Lafitte's captains met their fates variously at the hands of the American Navy or the British
campaign against pirates and slave-smugglers. Some simply encountered those deaths that
awaited so many white men in Louisiana: yellow fever, malaria, typhus.
In 1832 the Indian cholera reached Paris. Ayasha died.
January returned to New Orleans-to the town he had hoped never to live in again. To the only
family he knew. To a city he had left while it was still an outpost of France in the New World.
But he found, on his return, that the city had been inundated in his absence with Americans intent
on making a profit from slavery, from sugar, from cotton, and from everything else they could lay
their hands on. Much of the city was now the province of upriver Kentuckians whose
rapaciousness made Lafitte and his cronies look modest and whose manners made even such
hard-bitten souls as Cut-Nose Chighizola appear refined.
For a few years January lived in the garçonniere behind his mother's house, the small separate
chamber traditionally given to the growing son of the household. His mother had married a free
carpenter of color upon St.-Denis Janvier's death, and was now a respectable widow. January
made new friends, and renewed his ties with old. He played at quadroon balls and at the Opera,
and at the parties of Americans, free colored, and Creole French alike; he found refuge in the
familiar joys of music from the almost unbearable pain of loss in his heart.
He met a young schoolmistress named Rose Vitrac, Ayashas opposite in nearly every way:
erudite, gawky, bespectacled, and so heart-scarred and frightened of men that it was nearly a year
before she could endure the touch of his hand without pulling away.
He learned, a little to his surprise, that it was possible to love passionately without lessening for a
moment the ache of the love that had gone before.
And in all those years since 1812 he never so much as remembered Hesione LeGros' face, until
one day in the summer of 1835, when he walked into a shack near the back of town and saw her
dead body, with her head in a puddle of blood.
TWO
"When you a woman and black-not to mention dirt poor, God forbid"-the mocking sparkle in
Olympe Corbier's dark eyes was like the flash of dragonflies over a bitter lake-"there ain't a man
in this town'll smirch his boots crossin' the street to save your life. What makes you think
anybody'd come out here after she's already dead?"
Kneeling on the floor beside the body, January looked up at his sister, who had knocked at the
door of his lodgings an hour after sun-up, asking him to come with her here. He knew she was
right.
Olympe was his full sister, by that African field-hand his mother never spoke about. When at
sixteen she'd run away to join the voodoos, her mother hadn't even troubled to look for her. Her
work as healer and midwife among the poorer artisans, laborers, and freedmen of the town had
given her scant respect for the whites who made the city's laws.
Still it angered him that the City Guards hadn't troubled to send an officer out to this straggle of
shanties, shelters, and one- and two-room cottages huddled on the fringe of the still-more-
unsavory district of town universally known as the Swamp. It wasn't more than half a mile from
the turning-basin of the canal that connected New Orleans with the lake, and probably less than a
mile from the river itself. Although one of the liveliest and wealthiest cities in the United States
lay so close, oaks and cypress still grew among the wretched dwellings here; reeds and
marshgrass stood thick just outside the door.
It wasn't nine in the morning and the heat was like a hammer. Flies crept thick over every splash
and puddle of the blood-trail that started by the shack's upstream wall and ended under the body.
The cloud of insects overhead, up under the shack's low roof, made a dull droning, inescapable as
the stink of sewage or the sticky creep of sweat behind January's shirt-collar.
Heat, stink, flies. Summer in New Orleans.
"I heard how you not supposed to move somebody who been killed," said one of the neighbors,
peering in around Olympe's slim, tall form. A square young man, he wore the numbered tin
badge of a slave whose master let him "sleep out"-find his own room and board in exchange for a
percentage of what he could earn as a laborer. At this time of year, there was little work to be
had, even on the levee or the docks. "How you supposed to not touch nuthin' till the Guards had a
look." His ungrammatical French was the fluidly sloppy get-along speech of an Anglophone who
has made his home among French-speakers for a few months, not the half-African patois of the
slave quarters. Born in the eastern states, January guessed automatically, and sold down the river
...
"I sent Suzie right away downtown to the Cabildo." The young man nodded back at a girl of
sixteen or so who crowded up behind him. "I did look around, see if I could find some kerosene
or pepper or somethin' to keep the ants from comin' in. But they's all over the place already.
Hessy been dead awhile. Else I wouldn't a left her just lay on the floor."
"What'd they say at the Cabildo?" January tried to move the arm of the woman who lay sprawled
in the gummy pool of drying gore a few feet from the front door of the shack. The muscles were
hard as wood. Most of the blood had soaked into the dirt floor, and the smaller patches were
already dry. The smell was indescribable, early decay mingling with the metallic sharpness of
blood and the reek of piss and the spit tobacco with which the floor was liberally daubed. Ants
streamed in inch-thick black ribbons from three or four directions, under the shack's ill-fitting
board walls. Unlike the patient flies they went about their business, as ants do, unimpressed by
humankind.
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BenjaminJanuaryBook6WetGraveBarbaraHamblyForJillandCharlesSpecialthanksareduetoPamelaArceneauxandallthestafFoftheHistoricNewOrleansCollection;toAndyandSueGalliano:toJessicaHarris;toMary-LynneandLouCosta;toallthefolksatLeMondeCreoleandatLucullus;KateMiciakandKathleenBaldonadoofBantamBooks;andtoall...

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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：165 页 大小：702.8KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

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