The portress and her keys returned again, and parleyed a moment. ‘You are the Lord Malcolm in very deed—in the flesh?’
‘Wherefore not?’ demanded Malcolm.
‘Nay, but we heard ye were slain, my lord,’ explained the portress—letting him in, however, and leading them across the court, to where the Mother Abbess, Annabel Drummond, awaited them in the parlour.
‘Alas, Sirs, what grievous error has this been?’ was her exclamation; while Malcolm, scarcely waiting for salutation, demanded, ‘Where is my sister?’
‘How? In St. Hilda’s keeping at Whitby, whither the King sent for her,’ said the Abbess.
‘The King!’ cried Malcolm, ‘we come from the King! Oh, what treachery has been here?’
‘And you, Lord Malcolm—and you, my kinsman, Sir Patrick of the Braes, how do I see you here? We had heard you both were dead.’
‘You heard a lying tale then, good Mother,’ said Patrick, gruffly, ‘no doubt devised for the misery of the—of my—’ He could not finish the sentence, and Malcolm entreated the Abbess to tell the whole.
It appeared that about a year previously the chaplain of the monastery had learnt at Coldingham that Sir John Swinton of Swinton had sent home tidings that Patrick Drummond had been thrown from his horse and left behind in a village which the English had harried, and as he could not move, he was sure to have been either burnt or hung. This conclusion was natural, and argued no malice in the reporter; and while poor Lilias was still in her first agony of grief, Prior Drax sent over intelligence derived from the Duke of Albany himself that Malcolm Stewart of Glenuskie had been stabbed in the forest of Vincennes. This report Malcolm himself accounted for. He had heard a Scots tongue among his foes, though national feeling had made him utterly silent on that head to the Duke of Bedford, and he guessed it to belong to a certain M’Kay, whose clan regarded themselves as at feud with the Stewarts, and of whom he had heard as living a wild routier life. He had probably been hired by Ghisbert for the attack, and had returned home and spread the report of its success.
Some few weeks later, the Abbess Annabel continued, there had arrived two monks from Coldingham, with an escort, declaring themselves to have received orders from King James to transport the Lady Lilias to the nunnery at Whitby, where the Abbess had promised to receive her, till he could determine her fate.