Free The Shadow of Albion by Andre Norton, Rosemary Edghill Page A

had paced and fretted,
    drinking only of delivering deMorrisey’s information and saving Saint-Lazarre.
     
    Saint-Lazarre was at Mooncoign. Wessex cudgelled his brains. He had to admit
    he did not know Roxbury at all well, even though his grandmama had stood her
    godmother and Wessex himself had been formally betrothed to her when she was
    sixteen and he was twenty-four. His work for King and Country meant he had not
    seen much of the girl in the intervening years – it was, however, impossible not to
    have heard of her: the dashing parties, her autocratic behavior, her outrageous
    friendships. These scandals had been among the hottest on-dits of the Ton since the
    Marchioness had made her bow to Society – but her betrothed had taken little notice
    of them. A man playing the Shadow Game possessed little time for the
    claustrophobic world of the Upper Ten Thousand. And in fact, no matter how
    hideous Roxbury’s behavior, his own was worse.
     
    Rupert St. Ives Dyer, Duke of Wessex, was the third of that noble line – although
    his grandfather, before being so exalted, had been heir to the Earldom of Scathach, a
    dignity that had been old when William the Conqueror first beached his boats on
    Saxon shores. The Dukedom of Wessex, like so many English peerages, was the
    whimsical creation of a Stuart King – in this particular case, of King Charles the
    Fourth, upon the memorable occasion of Wessex’s grandfather’s birth. As might be
    expected from the nature of the creation of the tide, the mark of Stuart kinship was
    writ plainly upon Wessex’s long-jawed countenance. Though the pale wheat-gold
    hair worn Continentally long marked the Plantagenet strain in the line, the hot black
    eyes were purely Stuart, and Wessex was as stubborn and inflexible of purpose, as
    feared an enemy and as loyal a friend as were all the descendants of that kingly
    lineage.
     
    Though in the eyes of the world, Wessex was merely Captain His Grace the Duke
    of Wessex of the Eleventh Hussars - the Cherubims – a regiment currently with
    General Wellesley doing what they might to render Napoleon’s possession of
    Europe a matter of doubt – his captaincy was almost a formality; a liveried carte
    blanche that provided him the congé to some of the circles in which he must move.
    Wessex’s war was fought, not on battlefields, but in shadows and in country
     

 
    houses, in foreign courts and behind enemy lines.
     
    For the organization for which Wessex truly worked was not even remotely
    military in nature. Half a club of the most exclusive, half an order of chivalry sprung
    full-flowered from a most unlikely century, it was the Order of the White Tower.
     
    The White Tower was named for the earliest stronghold of English Kings. It had
    been founded by Charles the Third, and was the descendant of the espionage
    network that Lord Walsingham had run in Gloriana’s time. Its badge was gules, a
    tower argent, and a brooch with such a device resided somewhere in the back of a
    drawer in Wessex’s Albany rooms, unearthed only on those occasions when full
    Court dress was required of him.
     
    The White Tower was the English Crown’s official covert organization, and
    membership was an honor conferred by the King alone – quietly, without public
    display. The White Tower acted under conditions of strictest secrecy, its true
    function known only to King Henry and a handful of his most trusted ministers. Ever
    since its founding, the White Tower had served to defend the interests of the British
    Crown in any corner of the earth where those interests were threatened… and to
    gather the information to keep England free of Continental entanglements. For over a
    dozen years now, the eyes of the White Tower had been turned to France, and
    France’s regicidal and imperial ambitions.
     
    Wessex had been formally granted the Order of the White Tower at a levee held
    on his twenty-first birthday, just after he had come down from Oxford. The