"Well, hurry and get that candle lit and get back in bed." The March air whistled in through chinks in the log walls and shutters, and even though the inn's chimney ran up through this room it didn't seem to help. He guessed that downstairs in the taproom someone had let the fire die. Clarissa's pale, rounded shape as she moved through the shadows made him feel stronger by the moment. The women he'd had up to now--many of them right here in this bed--had been older and well-used, and he hadn't enjoyed the look of their bodies that much. Clarissa was just the right age, old enough to be filled out, young enough to be slender and firm. He guessed she must be sixteen or seventeen. Raoul had been bedding women since he was sixteen, for seven years now, and he'd never had a better night than this last one, with Clarissa. 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. _Indians living in our home! A squaw in the bed where Pierre slept with good Marie-Blanche!_ How could Pierre do such a thing, after what the Indians had done to Helene? After Raoul had spent two years beaten and enslaved by Black Salmon? How could Papa permit it? Clarissa turned, holding out before her a lighted white candle in a little pewter dish. She didn't seem so shy now about letting him see her naked. He let his eyes linger over her melon-shaped breasts, narrow waist, the brown puff of hair where her long legs joined her wide hips.