A word to De Clare, or De Montfort would bring the barons and their
retainers forty thousand strong to overwhelm the King's forces.

And he would let the King know to whom, and for what cause, he was beholden
for his defeat and discomfiture. Possibly the barons would depose Henry,
and place a new king upon England's throne, and then De Vac would mock the
Plantagenet to his face. Sweet, kind, delectable vengeance, indeed ! And
the old man licked his thin lips as though to taste the last sweet vestige
of some dainty morsel.

And then Chance carried a little leather ball beneath the window where the
old man stood; and as the child ran, laughing, to recover it, De Vac's eyes
fell upon him, and his former plan for revenge melted as the fog before the
noonday sun; and in its stead there opened to him the whole hideous plot of
fearsome vengeance as clearly as it were writ upon the leaves of a great
book that had been thrown wide before him. And, in so far as he could
direct, he varied not one jot from the details of that vividly conceived
masterpiece of hellishness during the twenty years which followed.

The little boy who so innocently played in the garden of his royal father
was Prince Richard, the three-year-old son of Henry III of England. No
published history mentions this little lost prince; only the secret
archives of the kings of England tell the story of his strange and
adventurous life. His name has been blotted from the records of men; and
the revenge of De Vac has passed from the eyes of the world; though in his
time it was a real and terrible thing in the hearts of the English.