Warwolfe (de Wolfe Pack Book 0)
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
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Kathryn Le Veque Novels
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
De Wolfe Pack Series
About Kathryn Le Veque
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.