“Two of them, a snivelling Jack Presbyter named Hicks and a rascal named Dunne, are taken already. Pray, madame, be so free and ingenuous with me aye, and so kind to yourself—as if there be any other person concealed in your house—and I am sure there is somebody else—to deliver him up, and you shall come to no further trouble.”
She looked up at him, and returned him smile for smile.
“I know nothing,” she said, “of what you tell me, or of what you ask.”
His countenance hardened.
“Then, mistress, the search must go on.”
But a shout from the adjoining room announced that it was at an end. Nelthorp had been discovered and dragged from the chimney into which he had crept.
Almost exactly a month later—on August 27th the Lady Alice Lisle was brought to the bar of the court-house at Winchester upon a charge of high treason.
The indictment ran that secretly, wickedly, and traitorously she did entertain, conceal, comfort, uphold, and maintain John Hicks, knowing him to be a false traitor, against the duty of her allegiance and against the peace of “our sovereign lord the King that now is.”
Demurely dressed in grey, the little white-haired lady calmly faced the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the four judges of oyer and terminer who sat with him, and confidently made her plea of “Not Guilty.”
It was inconceivable that Christian men should deal harshly with her for a technical offence amounting to an act of Christian charity. And the judge, sitting there in his robe of scarlet reversed with ermine, looked a gentle, kindly man; his handsome, oval, youthful face—Jeffreys was in his thirty-sixth year—set in the heavy black periwig, was so pale that the mouth made a vivid line of scarlet; and the eyes that now surveyed her were large and liquid and compassionate, as it seemed to her.