Die Upon a Kiss Read Online Free PDF

still pacing back and forth in the wet murk, ill-burning candle in hand. He’d stoop now and again to study something in the indescribable muck of churned-up mud, old straw, and trampled horse-droppings. By the lopsided glow January could see the dark niche of doorway where the two assassins had concealed themselves.
    But there was no sign anywhere of a knife.

TWO
    As a slave-child on a plantation called Bellefleur, Benjamin January had lived in music as naturally as a fish lives in water. His earliest memories were of his father whistling in the freezing dark as he washed in the trough behind the cabin that two families shared: every morning a different tune. Some were those African tunes men sang in the fields, songs whose meaning had been lost over the years but whose haunting melodies still moved the heart and the bones. Some were the bird-bright cotillions heard once or twice, when the Master had company at the big house and folks would loiter in the yard to listen to the fiddle played within. January’s father could whistle a tune back after hearing it once. When January grew older— freed by his mother’s new master and given proper piano lessons in the light-handed Austrian mode from an émigré—he was astonished at how many of those tunes he instantly recognized.
    What would Antonio Vivaldi have thought had he known that his “Storm at Sea” concerto would be whistled by a tall black man with tribal scars on his face, walking out to the sugar-harvest with his cane-knife in his hand?
    Why this should return to January’s mind as he entered the New Exchange Coffee House on Rue Chartres slightly before noon the following day he wasn’t sure. Perhaps because he’d learned to look at music as a sort of armature, a core or frame of reference around which other perceptions of the world were built. Perhaps because he knew, after playing the piano for a thousand dances and ten thousand lessons, how music can slip past the guards that the mind puts on itself, how it can alter the shape of thought before the thinker is aware of the change.
    Else why the anger over Beethoven’s symphonies? Why the riots over
Fidelio,
whose young lovers weren’t intriguers tricking an old husband or doting father, but patriots standing forth against tyranny? Why in Milan and Parma and Venice could one be arrested for whistling the barcarole from
La Muette de Portici: My friends, the dawn
is fair . . . ?
    It was only a tale of events centuries old, after all.
    Words were dangerous enough. In most of the United States it was now forbidden to teach slaves to read since the big slave revolts of 1828 and 1831. But music gave words power. Music made them memorable. Burned them like the R brand for
Runaway,
into the flesh of the heart.
    Thus it was that though January woke with his cut arm hurting so badly that he had to tie it into a makeshift sling in order to walk, he dressed and made his way to the headquarters of the City Guard in the Cabildo, in quest of Abishag Shaw.
    And the men at the Cabildo directed him here.
    January hated the New Exchange.
    As the brightly painted sign above its doors proclaimed, the front room was a coffee-house. The velvet aroma of the beans as they were roasted competed pleasantly in the dim spaces of vaulted plaster with the stinks of hair pomade, sweaty wool, cigar smoke, and the comprehensively uncleaned gutters of the Rue Chartres. January stepped through the tall French doors that lined two walls and searched for sight of Shaw among the men clustered on the backless benches, the rush-bottomed chairs around trestle tables. Well-dressed men for the most part, muttering in low voices and scratching figures in memorandum-books. Sober coats of brown or blue— Carnival did not penetrate to the New Exchange. Over in the corner a flash of delicate sky-blue announced Vincent Marsan’s exquisite presence. High-crowned hats of beaver or beaverette or of the more modern silk. Chiefly white men, though January