“Custance! Custance!” cried Edward and Isabel in concert.
“Let be, fair Cousins,” answered the cool unmoved tones of the King. “We can make large allowance for our cousin’s words—they be but nature.”
This astute man knew how to overlook angry words. And certainly no words he could have used would have vexed Custance half so much as this assumption of calm superiority.
“Speak your will, Lady,” he quietly added. “To all likelihood it shall do you some relievance to uncharge your mind after this fashion; and I were loth to let you of that ease. For us, we are used to hear our intent misconceived. But all said, hear our pleasure.”
Which was as much as to say with contemptuous pity,—Poor captive bird! beat your wings against the iron bars of your cage as much as you fancy it; they are iron, after all.
“Fair Cousin,” resumed the King, “you must be at this wedding, clad in your widow’s garb; and you must set your hand to the paper which our cousin Isabel holdeth. Know that if you be obedient, the custody and marriage of your son, with all lands of your sometime Lord, shall be yours, and you shall forthwith be set at full liberty, nor word further spoken touching past offences. But you still refusing, then every rood of your land is forfeit, and the marriages and custody of all your childre shall be given unto our fair aunt, the Duchess Dowager of York. We await your answer.”
It was not in words that the answer came at first. Only in an exceeding bitter cry—
“As of a wild thing taken in a trap,
Which sees the trapper coming through the wood.”
Custance saw now the full depth of misery to which she was doomed. The utmost concession hitherto wrung from her was that she would go to London and confront the King. And now it was calmly required of her that she should not only sign away her own fair name, but should confront Kent himself—should sit a quiet spectator of a ceremony which would publicly declare the invalidity of her right to bear his name—should by her own act consign her child to degradation and penury—should be a witness and a consenting party to the utter destruction of all her hopes of happiness. She knew that the lark might as well plead with the iron bars as she with Henry of Bolingbroke. And the penalty of her refusal was not merely poverty and homelessness. She could have borne that; indeed, the sentence about the estates passed by her, hardly noted. The bitterest sting lay in the assurance thus placidly given her, that her loving little Richard would be consigned to the keeping of a woman whom she knew to hate her fiercely—that he would be taught to hate and despise her himself. He would be brought up as a stranger to her; he would be led to associate her name with scorn and disgrace. And how was Joan likely to treat the children, when she had perpetually striven to vex and humiliate the mother?
The words came at last. But they were of very different character from those which had preceded them.