Both of them, your highness, stammered Ishida, facing Hideyoshi.
Then it was, as well, Ishida who poisoned, not Yodogima, but the intended cup? Away with you, and let one who has no need to choose pronounce judgment, for her son is my heir, and henceforth your kwambaku—I command it, vowed Hideyoshi, with no other consolation or assurance than a mothers kindly feeling, to foster and encourage the last act or wish of an utterly unrealized, if totally expended, higher ambition.
CHAPTER XXII
With the passing of Hideyoshi, Yodogima faced a maze possibly less promising than had the taiko lived longer—to suffer violence or subversion at the hands of those eager and prepared to take advantage of his decline. The captains, his real adherents, stood as it were, confused and unready; whereas had any one of the enemys schemes to do the master false sooner proven successful there should no doubt have been in consequence a mere pronounced or sudden welding and rousing of them to the cause he left. Yet, in the face of uncertainty, they gathered to a man in support of the infant kwambaku: also many of the larger daimyos proffered their friendship—if not to Hideyori, then to his mother—and Ozaka rang again resonant with the glamor of authority.
Oyea had been ignored, perhaps understood; Hideyoshi, at the last moment taking from her every visage of authority—discerning Yodogimas true disposition—her own conduct in the presence of all and under stress of a last appeal alienated others upon whom she might have reasonably depended.
Ill yet see her burned at the stake, muttered Oyea, departing unheeded and alone toward the beggarly inheritance left her—Azuchi, and that as well with no other immediate chance or real adviser save Esyo, the wife of an infant, a son of Ieyasu, Hidetada, verily Buddhist born.
A mixed situation, therefore, presented itself for her delectation. Yodogima had won favors on every hand, and there were no more Christians than Buddhists at Ozaka, with Shintoists a plenty and to spare over both. The government had been, as a last resort, intrusted to the care of five designated Regents during the minority of Hideyori: the taiko believed Yodogima competent to see that justice were done, and no one there assumed his responsibility more readily or inauspiciously than she.
Ill make my son ruler in fact, not alone suffer him to succeed in name: what greater end can a mother achieve than succor the laurels of a child she bears? meditated she, as the luxuries—even shorn of the comforts—of a respected, though unloved, husbands bounty showered down upon and around her.