No sound came out of his mouth but a useless little wheeze. He had lost his voice.
"You should not have angered them," Papa said.
One of the savages, holding high a long, thin skinning knife, seized Raoul"s b.a.l.l.s. He brought the knife down, slowly.
Raoul kept trying to scream at his father and brother. Again and again he forced air through his aching throat. Nothing came but a silly squeak. Then a groan, a little louder.
Pierre reached out a marble hand to him. Thank G.o.d!
Just as their fingers touched, Pierre jerked his hand away and disappeared.
Raoul felt the Indian"s blade like cold fire slicing through the sac between his legs. At last he let out a full-throated scream.
"Raoul!"
His body cold and wet with sweat, he sat up in darkness. He felt arms clutching at him and fought them off.
"Raoul! Wake up."
Panting, he said his name in his mind. _I am Raoul Francois Philippe Charles de Marion._ He repeated it over and over again to himself.
He was sitting in bed in the dark, someone beside him. Not an Indian, and not his long-dead sister Helene. He gasped again and again, as if he had run a race.
He tried to pull his mind together. His heart was still pounding against the wall of his chest, his hands trembling, his skin ice cold. That terrible dream! He hadn"t had it in a year or more.
"Lordy, what a nightmare you must have had! You did a right smart of hollerin"."
In the dim light seeping in through cracks in the shuttered window, Raoul saw a woman with long blond hair sitting up beside him, staring at him with pale blue eyes.
Clarissa. Clarissa Greenglove. He looked down at her. A warmth began to creep back into his body, rising first in his loins, as he remembered what they had done together the night before. Five times! No--six! Never before had he done it that many times in one night.
He was still panting in the aftermath of the horror, but the sight of her naked body was helping him get the dream out of his mind.
Never done it with such a good-looking woman.
She looked down at herself and drew up the sheet to cover her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
"Don"t do that," he said, and pulled the sheet down again, none too gently.
He began to rub her breast with the palm of his hand, feeling the nipple get bigger and harder. She closed her eyes and gave a little murmur of pleasure.
How she"d enjoyed it last night! She"d sighed and groaned and whimpered and screamed and licked him and bit him and twisted her body from side to side like a soul in perdition. Her frenzy had fired him up like never before. No wonder he"d been able to mount her so many times. And somewhere near the end of it all she"d sobbed into his shoulder for what seemed like an hour. He figured that was a tribute to what he had done to her. The sheets were still damp with their sweat, and the air in the little bedroom was thick with the musky odors of their secret juices.
But the redskins were still stalking in his brain, and he was still a little frightened. He didn"t want to sit here in the dark.
"Light a candle, will you?" he said. "The striker"s on that table."
She hesitated. "Can I get dressed first?"
"h.e.l.l no," he laughed. "What difference would that make after last night? I know you outside and in, Clarissa."
She giggled and got out of bed while he sat hugging his knees watching her.
"It"s cold out here," she whined.
"Well, hurry and get that candle lit and get back in bed." The March air whistled in through c.h.i.n.ks 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 wh.o.r.e 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, narrow waist, the brown puff of hair where her long legs joined her wide hips.
He"d often felt a hankering for Clarissa since he"d hired her father, Eli Greenglove, to help him run the trading post. But he"d thought it unwise to get mixed up with her. Eli was a dangerous man. Last night that hadn"t seemed to matter.
After Armand had brought him the bad news, he"d turned to Kentucky whiskey--Old Kaintuck--and to Clarissa, dancing with her to Registre Bosquet"s fiddle in the taproom to take his mind off this sudden insult Pierre had flung at him. Late in the evening he"d stumbled upstairs behind Clarissa to his bedroom in the inn, his hands up her skirts, feeling the satiny skin of her legs.
And then down on the bed, and--whiskey and all--six times!
But this morning his pleasure in her was spoiled by this treachery of Pierre"s.
A squaw and a redskinned mongrel. Raoul wouldn"t want Indians on the estate even as servants. Now Pierre was talking about these savages living in Victoire as part of the family.
He felt a sudden, stinging bite down near his rear end, under the covers. Angrily, he slapped at himself. d.a.m.ned fleas and bedbugs. Levi Pope"s wife made a p.i.s.s-poor job of laundering the bedding for the inn.
_If I had a wife I"d make sure she kept the bugs out of my sheets._