Lady Isobel's Champion. Carol Townend

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       www.millsandboon.co.uk

       AUTHOR NOTE

      Arthurian myths and legends have been popular for hundreds of years. Dashing knights worship beautiful ladies, fight for honour—and sometimes lose honour! Some of the earliest versions of these stories were written in the twelfth century by an influential poet called Chrétien de Troyes. Troyes was the walled city in the county of Champagne where Chrétien lived and worked. His patron, Countess Marie of Champagne, was a princess—daughter of King Louis of France, and the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine. Countess Marie’s splendid artistic court in Troyes rivalled Queen Eleanor’s in Poitiers.

      The books in my Knights of Champagne mini-series are not an attempt to rework the Arthurian myths and legends. They are original romances set around the Troyes court. I wanted to tell the stories of some of the lords and ladies who might have inspired Chrétien—and I was keen to give the women a more active role, since Chrétien’s ladies tend to be too passive for today’s reader.

      Apart from a brief glimpse of Count Henry and Countess Marie, my characters are all fictional. I have used the layout of the medieval city to create my Troyes, but these books are first and foremost fictional.

       DEDICATION

      To Karen, with love

       Chapter One

       October 1173—in the east tower of Ravenshold, in the County of Champagne

      With the tip of his dagger, Lucien Vernon, Comte d’Aveyron, prodded what looked suspiciously like a dead sparrow. ‘Is that what I think it is?’ He grimaced as he surveyed a table littered with leavings. There was a handful of tiny bones; any number of butterflies’ wings in a clay pot; and a mortar holding a gnarled fragment of bark that Lucien was pretty certain would never be seen in either kitchen or infirmary. The pestle was chipped, and the surface of the table was lost beneath a dusting of dead flies, leaf mast, beech nuts and acorns.

      ‘Dried bat?’ his friend Sir Raoul de Courtney suggested. ‘Or perhaps a toad?’ Raoul was examining a stoppered glass jar filled with cloudy liquid, his expression finely balanced between intense curiosity and disgust. Daylight was squeezing past a frill of cobwebs hanging in the lancet window. Holding the jar to the light, Raoul eyed the contents. ‘Mon Dieu!’ He dropped the jar on to the table with a thump that sent up a haze of dust. His lip curled, disgust had won out over curiosity. ‘Holy hell, Luc, haven’t you seen enough? Let’s get out of here.’

      Lucien scrubbed at his face, fingers lingering for a moment on the ragged scar on his left temple. The scar was throbbing, as it had been since he had learned of Morwenna’s untimely death, as it always did when he thought of her. ‘My apologies, Raoul, I thought I might find something here, some explanation as to why Morwenna died. Did I tell you I had to bribe Father Thomas before he would permit her to be buried in the graveyard?’