Mehr lesen
Zusatztext “A passionate story, steeped in rich and colorful history and vivid detail...Hambly mixes an exquisite blend of intrigue and suspense.”— Mystery Review “The darkest time in American history comes alive in Hambly's unforgettable series.” — Publishers Weekly Informationen zum Autor Barbara Hambly Klappentext In February 1835, the cold New Orleans streets are alight with masked Mardi Gras revelers as the American Theater's impresario, Lorenzo Belaggio, brings a magnificent yet controversial operatic version of Othello to town. But it's pitch-black in the alley where free man of color Benjamin January hears a slurred whisper, spies the flash of a knife, and is himself wounded as he rescues Belaggio from a vicious attack. Could competition for audiences—or for Belagio's affections—provoke such violent skulduggery? Or is Shakespeare's tragic tale, with its spectacle of a black man's passion for a white beauty, one that some Creole citizen—or American parvenu—would do anything to keep off the stage? The soaring music will lead January into a tangle of love, hate, and greed more treacherous than any onstage drama, as he must discover who is responsible...and who will Die Upon a Kiss. Leseprobe Chapter One ". . . nigger," muttered a man's voice, hoarse in the dark of the alley but very clear. Benjamin January froze in his tracks. Would this, he wondered, be the occasion on which he'd be hauled into court and hanged--or, more informally, beaten to death on the public street--for the crime of defending himself against a white man's assault? The gas-jet above the American Theater's stage door was out. A misty glimmer beyond the alley's narrow mouth showed him that the gambling-parlor at the City Hotel on the other side of Camp Street was still in operation, and above the wet plop of hooves, the creak of harness, a man's voice sang jerkily in English about Ireland's em'rald hills. It was past three and bitterly cold. Even in Carnival season, New Orleans had to sleep sometime. January considered turning immediately back to the stage door and retreating through the theater and out to the street by one of the side-doors that admitted patrons to its galleries or pit. He was a big man--six feet three--and built on what the slave-dealers at the baracoons along Baronne Street liked to call "Herculean" lines; he could have taken most assailants without trouble. But he was also forty-two years old and had learned not to take on anybody in a pitch-dark alley less than five feet wide, especially when he didn't know if they were a) armed b) white or c) alone. Words had been uttered: that implied one auditor at least. But Marguerite Scie, ballet mistress of the Theater's new Opera company, had locked the alley door behind him. By this time, she'd have ascended from the prop-room on the ground floor to the backstage regions immediately above. She and January had been catching up on seven years' worth of old times since rehearsal had ended at eleven, and January wasn't sure there was anyone else in the building to hear him pound the door and shout. And he'd learned that when white men got drunk enough to go around looking for black ones to beat up, flight was effective only if you were damn sure you'd get away. It was like escaping from a pack of wild dogs. If you acted like prey, you'd become it. For a time he stood listening in the darkness. Anger smoldered in him that he'd even contemplate flight. In Paris, where he'd lived for sixteen years, he'd been assaulted once or twice, coming home late from night surgery at the Hotel Dieu. Later, after his marriage, he'd played piano until the small hours at society balls, at the Opera or the ballet--jobs that paid more than a junior surgeon ever earned--and had walked through darker streets than this. But even in the Halles district, or the St. Antoine, few of the local ...
