Then why, after such a shining night, did he have that dream?
As the oil-soaked cotton ball flared up and Clarissa held a candlewick to the flame, the nightmare came back to him, and out of the roiling images of red limbs and painted faces and blood and torn white bodies, he dragged the reason for what he had dreamed. When he remembered it, he slumped a little, his delight in waking up next to a pretty young woman wiped away.
He heard again the stunning, infuriating words that had tumbled out of Armand Perrault's bushy brown beard.
I overheard your brother, Monsieur Pierre, talking to your father this morning. He spoke of how he has always felt that he had abandoned his Sauk Indian wife and their son, when he came back here and married Madame Marie-Blanche. Now that he is a widower, he says, he wants to "do right by her and the boy."
This thing about having a Sauk woman and a son—Pierre had never said anything about that.
To call some Indian whore a wife!
My brother, the master of Victoire, a squaw-man! Father of a mongrel son!
Armand had remarked sourly to Raoul, "It seems Monsieur Pierre is a great one for doing wrong by women."
Raoul knew what he meant. He'd heard the rumor that after Marie-Blanche had died, Pierre, a little crazy in his grief, had taken Armand's wife to bed a time or two, to comfort himself.
But that was nothing compared to what Pierre was threatening now.