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saw. The men glanced at each other and shrugged their shoulders. They were puzzled by their master's behavior. Most had been in his service for many years and they had seen him well and ill, angered and exhausted, sometimes near to despairing at the evil he found in men. Here, however, there was nothing to distress him. It was all holidaycheerful welcomes, the best food and entertainment, honest men with honest purposes. |
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Only Ian de Vipont, Simon's squire, had a glimmering of understanding. He was suffering from the same disease and had lain awake more nights than he slept with Alinor's image hanging before his eyes. He was not jealous. To him, Alinor was a distant star and he did not dream of attempting to reach for her. His feeling, although he was much the same age as Alinor, having just passed his seventeenth year, was very similar to what Simon had felt nearly twenty-five years ago for the Queen. |
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Thus, Ian's pain, unmixed with even the faintest hope of assuagement, was somewhat akin to joy. Simon, however, had outgrown worship. First of all, it was impossible to worship Alinor, who drove him alternately from helpless laughter to equally helpless, roaring rages, which he thought he had conquered twenty years past, and back to laughter. Alinor was all too human, a woman to love, not a goddess to worship. Secondly, she was not impossible of achievement. If he were willing to compromise his honor, there were several paths by which he might obtain her. |
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The most direct path was to do what Sir Andre had warned him others might try to do. He could take Alinor by force to one of her more inaccessible keeps, suborn a priest into marrying them, and get her with child. Doubtless Richard would be too busy preparing for his crusade to begin a war about the disposition of one heiressespecially to a man he well knew would be faithful to him. He would set an enormous |
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