message had been sent to his namesake in Normandy regarding his request.
It was Humphrey who led a force north to take Benevento, and with enough men outside their walls to eventually overcome the defences the people of the town saw safety in deposing Landulf and sending him on his way into exile, then, after a decent interval to allow him to get safely clear, to open their gates to the Norman host. An extensive and fertile province soon found itself at the mercy of bands of Normans, riding in raiding parties, who now acted like the overlords of the principality.
Bras de Fer was dead long before permission to build a stone donjon reached the tiny hamlet of Hauteville- la-Guichard. The time it had taken to come as a request to Duke William and to be acted upon took several months. It came to a manor house in which old Tancred was also fading from long years, sheer fatigue and all the wounds his body had borne in a life of combat, not aided by too hearty an appetite for the pressed products of his orchards. He would be buried beside both of his wives, whose graves lay in the churchyard where Geoffrey de Montbray had christened all his sons.
Roger, now with spots and a broken, rasping voice, was the one, along with his sisters, to greet the messenger, none other than their one-time family confessor. Geoffrey of Montbray was on his way to Coutances to adjudicate the disputes of that vacant and troubled bishopric. The rest of the de Hauteville brothers were fighting in the service of Duke William, helping him to subdue the last province of Normandy to hold out in its entirety against his cause, their own Contentin.
Tancred raised himself enough to see the first stones laid, but did not live to see his dream completed. He passed to the other side with the last rites of his nephew in his ears and the images of his distant sons before his eyes, seeing them as they were, as their younger selves, with full-flowing fair hair and deep-blue eyes, laughing, fighting, riding in the fields below the manor, training with weapons to be the warriors he wanted them to become. Roger apart, they were that now and he would be soon.
But most of all he saw the face of his eldest, his true heir, and the image of William was of him standing at the top of the old wooden tower overlooking the demesne, now being replaced by that stone donjon, as he handed him a cloak on a cold autumn day many years before, the one in which he had ridden away from his birthplace for ever. He would have thanked God, had he known, that he died in ignorance of his firstborn preceding him to the grave.
The deep knife wound was not the sole cause of his eldest son’s demise, though it had so weakened William that when his fever recurred, a reprise of that from which he had suffered at Trani, he lacked the vigour to hang on to life, and hardly had the strength to hold hard to his brother’s hand as the end approached. His body was wasted, no longer that of the warrior he had so proudly been, and the voice as he spoke was so weak Drogo had to lean close to hear him.
‘If I have a son, Drogo, raise him to make me proud.’ Drogo did not look round to where Berengara stood, with her swollen belly that might contain a boy-child: he feared to look into her eyes lest he see in them a degree of pleasure for what she was seeing. ‘He will, at least, have my title.’
‘He will, brother,’ Drogo replied, though he had doubts if that would be the case.
The Normans would not follow an infant, regardless of how much they esteemed his father: they were now too numerous and eager for further conquests and they had enemies to hand who they would ride out to fight; they needed at their head a man of similar stature to the dying man on the cot. William’s title was too new a creation to have built within it the kind of loyalty that had sustained Normandy, and it would take a strong hand and a good leader to merely hold on to what had been gained. There was no king of the Franks nearby, either, with an army to protect any child inheritor, just the bind that held together the males of de Hauteville.
One by one they came: his brothers, to kneel at his side and kiss his fevered brow; the last to do so Berengara, who allowed his hand to feel the kick of the child she was carrying. But she shed no tears, for she would not, even in the face of a coming death, be a hypocrite and pretend a love she did not possess. Tirena had to wait till he was cold to weep over his cadaver, and she had to be dragged clear, sobbing, as the monks came to prepare the body for burial. Drogo had her sent to a nunnery as soon as she had said her farewells, while her brother Listo was sent to become a monk.
The requiem mass for William de Hauteville’s soul was said in the Latin rite, as befitted a son of the Church of Rome, and his remains were interred in a vault in the local church, a building surrounded by row upon row of the silent men — Normans, Lombards and Italians — that William had led into battle. If they had come to mourn his passing, they also had a deep and abiding interest in what would happen next: they were an army now, ready to live off conquest and that alone.
As the brothers emerged into the strong sunlight, with Drogo at their head, the warriors with bowed heads ceased their prayers and one senior Norman captain, Hugo de Boeuf, who had a clear notion of what was required now, raised his head to yell out, in a clear and carrying voice.
‘All hail to Count Drogo!’
The silence that followed lasted a very short time, until the cry was taken up by every throat, growing to an endless roar until it echoed off the high hills surrounding the town and castle of Melfi. The man being acclaimed stood stock-still and confused, still mourning for a brother he loved.
‘I do not want this,’ he whispered, even if he knew it to be the only solution to the thoughts he had as William was dying.
‘You must take it, Drogo,’ said the next oldest, Humphrey, ‘for if you do not we may as well saddle our mounts and head back to Normandy.’
Geoffrey and Mauger concurred, pushing him to the fore, but it was the brother he liked least who decided Drogo, for Robert de Hauteville said in a hard tone, ‘If you don’t accept it, Drogo, I will.’
Slowly, and not entirely willingly, Drogo raised his arms to accept the acclamation, which had the serried ranks of warriors break, as they rushed forward to lift him on their shoulders. The man they were carrying was praying that he had the strength not to disappoint them.
Before a month went by, Rainulf of Aversa followed William to the grave, leaving his young son Hermann as heir to his title, and his nephew Richard Drengot to lead his lances and guard the boy, given one was needed. The emperor’s dispensations achieved very quickly a result he had surely not intended: certainly he had split the sources of power in Southern Italy so that no one magnate could overawe the others, but that had quickly turned into a low-level conflict which sat on the brink of breaking out into all-out war, as Pandulf sought to regain all of that which he had lost and Guaimar manoeuvred to block him.
Naples and Gaeta were busy seeking defensive alliances and the Abbot of Montecassino was firing off endless missives to Bamberg, insisting on imperial protection for his lands and revenues. Pandulf, in the past, had reduced the place to such penury by his depredations that the monks had been obliged to leave the monastery just to find the means to eat and drink, and that was after he had stripped the place of not only its accumulated treasure but its priceless library of illuminated manuscripts.
The Prince of Salerno’s first act on hearing of Rainulf’s demise was to hurry to Aversa, to the stone donjon which lay hard by the base camp the old Norman had created so many years before, near to a town now in its own right, not to pay his respects to the dead but to converse with the living; Richard Drengot made sure that once the ceremonies of welcome were over he received Guaimar on his own.
The prince sat silently for some time, looking at a room where the bare stone walls had been broken up by tapestries and the furniture was more suited to a villa than a defensive donjon. ‘The first time I came here I was a callow youth with a message to your uncle from the late Emperor Conrad. William de Hauteville was present also, in fact he did all the talking. It was from those discussions that Rainulf got his title.’
‘My uncle told me of that meeting.’
‘You are aware of what has occurred at Melfi?’
It was an abrupt gambit, but Richard was not fazed. He nodded and tried to give the appearance of a man who had not thought something of the same would be best here, his voice, as he replied, sonorous with responsibility.
‘Hermann’s father, my uncle, bequeathed me a sacred trust, Prince Guaimar.’
The man he was talking to understood how overweight that statement was: too laden by far. Sacred indeed, and why refer to Rainulf in such an abstract manner? ‘Or he left you a heavy burden, Richard.’
‘It is not one honour would allow me to put aside.’
