Masters of Medieval Romance: Series Starters Volume 1 Read online

  MASTERS OF MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

  Series Starts Volume I

  By Kathryn Le Veque

  © Copyright 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2019 by Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc.

  Kindle Edition

  Text by Kathryn Le Veque

  Reproduction of any kind except where it pertains to short quotes in relation to advertising or promotion is strictly prohibited.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  License Notes:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook, once purchased, may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or borrow it, or it was not purchased for you and given as a gift for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. If this book was purchased on an unauthorized platform, then it is a pirated and/or unauthorized copy and violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do not purchase or accept pirated copies. Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work.

  ARE YOU SIGNED UP FOR KATHRYN’S BLOG?

  You’ll get the latest news and information on exclusive giveaways, exclusive excerpts, coming releases, sales, free books, cover reveals and more.

  Kathryn’s blog followers get it all first. No spam, no junk.

  Get the latest info from the reigning Queen of English Medieval Romance!

  Sign Up Here

  Kathryn Le Veque Novels

  Medieval Romance:

  De Wolfe Pack Series:

  Warwolfe

  The Wolfe

  Nighthawk

  ShadowWolfe

  DarkWolfe

  A Joyous de Wolfe Christmas

  BlackWolfe

  Serpent

  A Wolfe Among Dragons

  Scorpion

  StormWolfe

  Dark Destroyer

  The Lion of the North

  Walls of Babylon

  The de Russe Legacy:

  The Falls of Erith

  Lord of War: Black Angel

  The Iron Knight

  Beast

  The Dark One: Dark Knight

  The White Lord of Wellesbourne

  Dark Moon

  Dark Steel

  A de Russe Christmas Miracle

  The de Lohr Dynasty:

  While Angels Slept

  Rise of the Defender

  Steelheart

  Shadowmoor

  Silversword

  Spectre of the Sword

  Unending Love

  Archangel

  Lords of East Anglia:

  While Angels Slept

  Godspeed

  Great Lords of le Bec:

  Great Protector

  House of de Royans:

  Lord of Winter

  To the Lady Born

  The Centurion

  Lords of Eire:

  Echoes of Ancient Dreams

  Blacksword

  The Darkland

  Ancient Kings of Anglecynn:

  The Whispering Night

  Netherworld

  Battle Lords of de Velt:

  The Dark Lord

  Devil’s Dominion

  Bay of Fear

  The Dark Lord’s First Christmas

  Reign of the House of de Winter:

  Lespada

  Swords and Shields

  De Reyne Domination:

  Guardian of Darkness

  With Dreams

  The Fallen One

  House of d’Vant:

  Tender is the Knight (House of d’Vant)

  The Red Fury (House of d’Vant)

  The Dragonblade Series:

  Fragments of Grace

  Dragonblade

  Island of Glass

  The Savage Curtain

  The Fallen One

  Great Marcher Lords of de Lara

  Lord of the Shadows

  Dragonblade

  House of St. Hever

  Fragments of Grace

  Island of Glass

  Queen of Lost Stars

  Lords of Pembury:

  The Savage Curtain

  Lords of Thunder: The de Shera Brotherhood Trilogy

  The Thunder Lord

  The Thunder Warrior

  The Thunder Knight

  The Great Knights of de Moray:

  Shield of Kronos

  The Gorgon

  The House of De Nerra:

  The Promise

  The Falls of Erith

  Vestiges of Valor

  Realm of Angels

  Highland Warriors of Munro:

  The Red Lion

  Deep Into Darkness

  The House of de Garr:

  Lord of Light

  Realm of Angels

  Saxon Lords of Hage:

  The Crusader

  Kingdom Come

  High Warriors of Rohan:

  High Warrior

  The House of Ashbourne:

  Upon a Midnight Dream

  The House of D’Aurilliac:

  Valiant Chaos

  The House of De Dere:

  Of Love and Legend

  St. John and de Gare Clans:

  The Warrior Poet

  The House of de Bretagne:

  The Questing

  The House of Summerlin:

  The Legend

  The Kingdom of Hendocia:

  Kingdom by the Sea

  The Executioner Knights:

  By the Unholy Hand

  The Promise (also Noble Knights of de Nerra)

  The Mountain Dark

  Starless

  A Time of End

  Contemporary Romance:

  Kathlyn Trent/Marcus Burton Series:

  Valley of the Shadow

  The Eden Factor

  Canyon of the Sphinx

  The American Heroes Anthology Series:

  The Lucius Robe

  Fires of Autumn

  Evenshade

  Sea of Dreams

  Purgatory

  Other non-connected Contemporary Romance:

  Lady of Heaven

  Darkling, I Listen

  In the Dreaming Hour

  River’s End

  The Fountain

  Sons of Poseidon:

  The Immortal Sea

  Pirates of Britannia Series (with Eliza Knight):

  Savage of the Sea by Eliza Knight

  Leader of Titans by Kathryn Le Veque

  The Sea Devil by Eliza Knight

  Sea Wolfe by Kathryn Le Veque

  Note: All Kathryn’s novels are designed to be read as stand-alones, although many have cross-over characters or cross-over family groups. Novels that are grouped together have related characters or family groups. You will notice that some series have the same books; that is because they are cross-overs. A hero in one book may be the secondary character in another.

  There is NO reading order except by chronology, but even in that case, you can still read the books as stand-alones. No novel is connected to another by a cliff hanger, and every book has an HEA.

  Series are clearly marked. All series contain the same characters or family groups except the American Heroes Series, which is an anthology with unrelated characters.

  For more information, find it in A Reader’s Guide to the Medieval World of Le Veque.

  Contents

  Warwolfe

  While Angels Slept


  Lord of War: Black Angel

  Lespada

  The Dark Lord

  Dragonblade

  WARWOLFE

  The Origins of the de Wolfe Pack

  A Medieval Romance

  By

  Kathryn Le Veque

  Author’s Note

  Finally… it’s here!

  There’s so much to say about this novel that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s start from the beginning.

  The details of the Battle of Hastings are accurate but for the fact that I added a group of knights that helped the Duke of Normandy win the battle. Everything else – from the location of the Norman landing to the details of Harold’s death are fact. But because there is so little documentation about the details of the battle (surprisingly), that’s where I begin to weave my fabric of fiction. A few things of note for the sharp-eyed reader:

  Warwolfe is mentioned in Swords and Shields. Edward I built massive trebuchets for his battles in Scotland and named the machines Warwolfs (Lupus Guerre), after the de Wolfe ancestor (that is mostly true – Edward I really did build machines named Warwolf, but it’s the Le Veque imagination that put the backstory behind it). Yes, a Warwolf really is a thing!

  William de Wolfe (THE WOLFE) comes from the House of de Wolfe – and it was Gaetan who was given the title 1st Earl of Wolverhampton, as explained in The Lion of the North. William de Wolfe was the third son of his father, however, and his eldest brother, Robert, inherited the title and passed it down through his children. William was given the title Baron Kilham and eventually Earl of Warenton by Henry III.

  King Wulfhere founded the city of Wolverhampton in 659 AD – the Duke of Normandy thought it would be perfect for de Wolfe to subdue and rule because of the name, so that’s the how and why of the de Wolfes ending up in Wolverhampton. There is lots of coal in the area of Wolverhampton (called the Black Country), which is how the de Wolfes end up making their money.

  Gaetan’s name was shorted by his men to “Gate” at times, which is how Gates de Wolfe in Dark Destroyer got his name – he was named for Gaetan.

  The House of de Shera is born in this book. The Roman origins of de Shera (Shericus) were mentioned in The Thunder Lord, but in this novel we actually get to see how the House of de Shera came about. They are around Worcester in this novel and it is Gaetan who gives them lands around Chester, which is referred to in the Lords of Thunder series.

  Fun fact: William the Conqueror and Harold Godwinson were cousins. They had met each other several times before the Battle of Hastings and, at one point, Harold even endorsed William as the next king of England when the current king at the time (about 10 years before Hastings) died. William went to England to take it from Harold because the man had catfished on him, among other reasons.

  So, let’s talk pronunciation of certain names – because there are some odd ones in this book, genuine “old English” or even older names. Here are a few to note:

  Gaetan: GAY-tahn

  Ghislaine: GIZZ-lane

  Téo: TAY-o

  Aramis: Some say Ara-MEE, I say “ARA-miss”. Like the cologne.

  Alary: Just like it looks – Al-uh-ree

  Mercia: MER-sha (Not Mer-cee-uh)

  Oh, and the lion images that denote breaks in the chapters? That is the lion of the Duke of Normandy.

  With that, I truly hope you enjoy this epic tale of adventure, brotherhood, and, ultimately, a romance like none other. Enjoy the original de Wolfe Pack – they were a joy to write!

  Happy Reading!

  Kathryn

  PROLOGUE

  ‡

  The Legend of WARWOLFE

  Battle, East Sussex

  Two years ago, Present Day

  “Queenie? Are you home?”

  A gray-haired man with a hand-hewn wooden cane opened the old door even as he pounded on it, raining rust from the old hinges onto the floor. The house in which the door was lodged was ancient by any standard, a squat farmhouse built from the pale gray stone that was so prevalent to the area. There were big warped beams running up the exterior walls, however, which suggested late-Medieval architecture, but the shape and design of the house was purely Georgian. Everything was symmetrical from the alignment of the old cracked windows to the roofline, pitched in shape and covered with dried thatching that matched the color of the stone.

  It was every historian’s dream.

  Which was why the young woman behind the gray-haired man was so wide-eyed at what she was seeing, following the man into the cool foyer as her eyes so greedily soaked up all of the ancientness around her. This was pure awesomeness as far as she was concerned and she tried not to be distracted by the time-capsule quality of the old house.

  They were in search of someone.

  “Queenie!”

  The old man banged his cane on the wooden floor, a floor that, at one time, had been finished but now it just looked splintered and dirty. And the smell of the house… God, the smell was that of dust and must and dampness.

  It was glorious.

  “Do you think he’s home?” the young woman asked timidly. “I mean, the front door was open and….”

  “He’s home,” the gray-haired man cut her off with confidence. “Queensborough Browne and I have known each other for many years. My family has lived in a house on Telham Lane adjacent to this house since the turn of the last century. My property backs up to Queenie’s property. He’s most definitely home, Miss Devlin. He never leaves. Therefore, we simply have to find him.”

  So they were on a hunt for a man named Queensborough Browne and Abigail Devlin was simply along for the ride, an important path in the course of her research for her Ph.D. dissertation in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. She’d been to the bucolic village of Battle several times over the past nine months, all of her time spent at the battlefield or the museum that held the artifacts of the Battle of Hastings. During these many visits, she’d struck up a friendship with one of the docents there, a Mr. Peters Groby.

  It had been a most fortuitous acquaintance.

  Mr. Groby was blind in one eye, half-crippled and had a terrible wet cough that seemed to weaken him when it came on, but the man knew the history of England, and the history of the Battle of Hastings, like nobody’s business. He and Abigail spoke weekly and she’d been making the trek down to Battle nearly every weekend to listen to his tales and speak with the curators of the museum. They had artifacts and documentation in their archives that she’d been given access to, thanks to Mr. Groby, and she was very grateful for it, but it seemed like all of that history wasn’t telling her much about what she really wanted to know. For Abigail, she was looking for something very specific.

  The unsung heroes of the Norman Invasion and their impact upon the Conquest.

  That was the tentative title of her dissertation. She’d refine it at some point, but right now, that was pretty much the entire focus of her paper – the men other than the Duke of Normandy who had made a difference in the conquest of England. The curators at the museum had been very helpful with suggestions on where else she could find additional material that might tell her of the driving forces behind the Duke of Normandy’s army, but the truth was that there was very little documentation about that subject in general. There wasn’t a great deal known from period sources about the actual Battle of Hastings and the ensuing conquest.

  Nearly a year into the first of three years for her Ph.D. studies, Abigail was starting to become discouraged with just how very little information there was about a subject she was certain held great and deep secrets – the front lines of the Duke of Normandy’s army, the knights who would have led the cavalry and would have broken through the English army’s mighty shield wall, a shield wall that had held for nearly nine hours on that fateful day. But someone had eventually broken through.

  Abigail wanted to know who that was.

  Now, she had what she thought might be a breakthrough in finding out. Mr. Groby had a friend, it see
med, whose family had been original land owners in the area in the High Middle Ages. This family was very old and the very last of the line, an old man by the name of Queensborough Browne, lived like a hermit off of Powdermill Road, which was in sight of the battlefield and the demolished abbey. Mr. Groby had made an appointment on this day to go and see him but it seemed that Queensborough was nowhere to be found.

  Now, they were wandering in the guy’s house like a couple of burglars, hunting him down as Mr. Groby continued to bang his cane on the floor and call his friend’s name.

  “Queenie!”

  “Mr. Groby, maybe he’s just not here,” Abigail said, trying to insist because, even though she was awestruck by the old house, it didn’t seem right prowling through it without an invitation. “I can always come back. I’ll be back next weekend.”

  “Nonsense,” Groby said. “He is here, somewhere. He’s expecting us, I assure you.”

  Abigail wasn’t so sure. They had made their way through the foyer, into what appeared to be a back hall that was cluttered to the roof with all kinds of things, and now they were entering an extremely old kitchen. The floor was stone and the stove in what had been the old hearth had to be a hundred years old. They hadn’t made stoves like that for decades, if not centuries. The old sink was iron and the very old spigots were also made of iron, or so it seemed. Truthfully, it was difficult to tell. As they passed through the kitchen and towards what looked like an orangery beyond, an old man suddenly appeared with plants in his hands.

  “Queenie!” Groby exclaimed. “Didn’t you hear me calling you, old man?”

  Queensborough Browne looked rather surprised to see his friend, immediately spying the young woman behind him. A stub of a man with a crown of white hair that looked like cotton and enormous hands now dirty from potting, his old eyes inspected the young woman for a moment before replying.

  “Is that the girl?” he asked.

  Groby nodded, turning to look at Abigail rather proudly. “An American convert,” he said. “She’s coming back over to this side of the pond. A very intelligent young lady, actually. This is Miss Abigail Devlin. Miss Devlin, this is my friend, Mr. Queensborough Browne.”

  Queensborough’s gaze lingered on Abigail for a moment before turning to set the plants down on the potting table behind him. In fact, the entire room with glass walls and ceiling, called a sunroom in America but in England it had a variety of names, like garden room or The Orangery, was full of plants in various stages of growth. Plastic pots littered the table along with gorgeous mums and foxgloves. Queensborough brushed off his dirty hands as he returned his attention to his guests.