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.
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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.