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heard.’
    ‘How do you know that?’
    ‘Your brother Roger related the tale of your upbringing to my sister. He says Tancred saw you as a sore trial.’
    The Guiscard grinned at that. ‘Roger blathers too much, though what he says is true – my father and I never saw eye to eye.’
    ‘Roger has it that you were too much alike.’
    ‘Does that same blabbermouth tell you why I had to leave?’ Robert demanded, leaving his son to wonder at his irritation; was it Roger talking too much or memory? ‘Not that I was overly inclined to stay where I was scarce welcome and there was little chance of advancement.’
    Bohemund did not reply, which made Robert curious, for the lad could hardly have failed to have heard that the leaving of Normandyhad been forced upon him, nor could he be unaware of the dearth of opportunity that had brought his uncles south beforehand. Having been thinking of a way to approach Bohemund throughout the feast, his father now saw a route to entice him into a better understanding of his own life and actions, which might bind him to his cause.
    How much of that family narrative did the boy really know, and was what he had heard accurate or part of the same embellishments shouted at him as Duke of Apulia in the great hall? If he had been at war with his father, Robert de Hauteville had not enjoyed one easy relationship with his numerous brothers, at home or in Italy, yet for all of the sibling disputes he was strong on family. Despite all their arguments, when danger threatened they hung together to avoid dangling apart, and to that, more than any other characteristic, could be ascribed their success.
    Robert had faith in that as the means to keep secure and expand his possessions, but he was down to a single brother now: the others who had come to Italy had all passed over, while those who had stayed behind in Normandy showed no inclination to travel. In recent times the mixture of disputes and cooperation had been with the aforementioned Roger, the youngest in the family, and he had been leant on heavily when it came to fighting Byzantium, especially in Calabria. Now fully occupied in Sicily, he would only leave the island if the circumstances were so dire it was essential to protect their joint holdings and his line of communication.
    ‘Did you know your Uncle Serlo knifed a high-ranking vassal of Duke William at his castle of Falaise, when weapons and their use had been expressly forbidden within the walls?’
    Bohemund did not respond, forcing his father to continue and leaving him to wonder at what he had previously heard. ‘To avoid therope he had to flee for the deed and I was obliged to depart, sharing as I did his guilt by association, given I was with him when murder was done. Serlo went to England to fight with the Saxons, I came here to Italy and to a cold welcome.’
    Robert laughed suddenly, filling the small chamber with the sound. ‘My brothers were not cheered by my arrival. I was seen as a nuisance and shoved off to lawless Calabria where my men and I were reduced to living off my stirrup leathers. It was not a happy or glorious time.’
    He paused then, possibly expecting Bohemund to comment, but the young man continued to hold his tongue as his father’s mind filled with images of those years of struggle, of his crabbed half-brothers, never adding to his thoughts of them and the way he had been treated that he had been more than half at fault for his brash way of diminishing them – even William Iron Arm, the steady, shrewd genius who had first engineered the rise in the family fortunes, going from a mere mercenary lance to being called the Count of Apulia in a decade. William had been murdered, to be followed by the irrepressible Drogo, another brother destined to fall to an assassin’s blade, unarmed while exiting a church that he had endowed and had built in memory of his favourite saint.
    Next came miserable Humphrey who had succeeded them to the title they had taken, aided