There Shall Your Heart Be Also Read Online Free

time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black
suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on
the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and
gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s
uncertain lamplight.
    “I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of
God, is there a Bible in this house?”
    As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ
from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal
and January traded a disbelieving glance. “I’ve seen better acting
at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.
    The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched
the volume to his insanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my
daughter...”
    And with a crash, the lights went out.
    “Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly,
as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms
spring through the door between them and sprint away across the
yard.
    Inside the saloon, men were crashing around
and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed,
“Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”
    “Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler,
as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised
us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank
accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of
her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that
our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months,
writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he
doesn’t have right.”
    “Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said
January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a
saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl – who’s going to
be scarred for the rest of her life – deserves more than a little
frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure-map leading
to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the
south of Mexico: a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in
the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said
nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of
them died. A land wrought by Satan , he said, to punish
sinners .”
    Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you think he’ll
go?”
    “He will if he wants the four hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in Spanish gold I said was buried
there.”
    “Considering the amount of money he’ll have
to borrow to finance an expedition,” mused Hannibal, “and the time
it will take, and the gnawing anxiety of knowing there’s a treasure
just waiting for him—”
    “If he’s willing to seek it,” said January
gently. “Which we know, from his actions, that he is. Where your
treasure is – wholley imaginary, in this case -- there will
your heart be also ... and for Mr. Porter, almost certainly his
fever-ridden bones as well.”
    Hannibal paused, his hand on the rungs of the
ladder. “For such a thoroughly nice man, Ben,” he said, “you can be
a complete son of a bitch.”
    “Thank you,” said January. “I have my
moments. Now let’s start writing those letters to the banks, and
see how much of the real treasure is left to collect.”

 
     
     
    About the Author
     
     
    Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the