Knights of the Black and White by Jack Whyte

Author:Jack Whyte [Whyte, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Mystery & Detective, Action & Adventure, Adventure Fiction, Religious, Historical Fiction, Crusades, Templars
ISBN: 9780515143331
Publisher: Jove
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THREE

In the course of the six weeks that followed their initial meeting, Stephen St. Clair met the princess three more times, apparently by sheerest accident on each occasion. Unworldly as he was, it did not occur to him that Alice might be having him watched, tracing his movements so that she might intercept him whenever she so wished, and he would have been genuinely shocked had anyone suggested to him that she might have any prurient interest in him as a man. But even he, unsophisticated and self-effacing as he was, admitted wonder at the frequency with which he saw the princess during that time, particularly because she was seldom far from his mind and was unwittingly causing him a degree of embarrassment. He had taken to dreaming of her and spilling his seed involuntarily in the night, and whereas there was nothing new in that, he had seldom if ever in the past recalled any specific dream triggering such episodes. They had always been unsettling and vaguely troubling, noticeable only from the evidence they left in passing. Now, however, he had sprung awake shuddering with release several times, with the vision of the princess's face filling his mind, along with the devastatingly tactile but impossible memory of friction, and her flesh burning against his.

The experience, and his inability to prevent it or even to put it from his mind during the day, had begun to cause him grave concern, so that he had determined to seek out a priest and confess to what he believed must be grievous sins. He had not yet done that, because of his training in the Order, but his awareness of the need to do it—to purge himself of the guilt he was feeling— contributed greatly to his reactions to Alice when he found himself face to face with her. The first time, on the morning after his first clearly recalled dream of her, he had not been able to look her in the eye, and his embarrassment would not allow him to speak to her at all. Alice's amusement at his pitiable shyness was almost completely genuine, but she had cut the interview short, releasing him to his misery.

The second meeting had been much the same, except that this time St. Clair had managed to stammer out a few words in answer to several of Alice's questions. Once again, however, Alice had decided that it was not yet time for her to press ahead with her designs for the young knight, and so she had concentrated simply but intently upon making him feel at ease in her company, and lulling him into a belief, eventually, that her feigned interest in his brethren and their activities was genuine.

She was more than three years his junior, eighteen years old to his one-and-twenty, but in life experience Alice le Bourcq was decades older than he was. St. Clair was a virgin; his entire life, lived away from women and dominated by the pious and dedicated men

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