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and gone and best forgotten by us all. No one even mentions her except in connection to my half-sister, Elizabeth.” Mary’s lips curled unpleasantly around those four syllables, as though the little girl’s name itself tasted sour in her mouth.
    Bridget, seizing upon the reference to Anne’s daughter, saw an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about her whereabouts. She asked with studied indifference, “What has become of the Lady Elizabeth, Your Grace?”
     
    “The king keeps her in the country, at Hunsdon mostly,” the Lady Mary replied, offhandedly. “She is well provided for, as one would expect, but he has no wish to see her. Nobody does. It is not the child’s fault, of course. She is a sweet natured, little thing, but one can understand fully why His Majesty wants nothing more than to house her well out of his sight. Besides, who is to say that she is even his daughter? Her mother was the most infamous whore ever seen in England. Personally, I have always thought that she has the look of that lute player, Smeaton, about her. She is the image of him I warrant.”
     
    Bridget had to bite the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from answering back to such a calumny. Elizabeth the daughter of Mark Smeaton? Is that what was being said? She had heard many ridiculous rumours in her short life, but that one would have to top them all. Anyone who had ever seen Elizabeth would know that she was a Tudor through and through. No rational person could dispute her parentage. But looks were one thing, a mother’s reputation quite another. Elizabeth’s mother had been convicted of committing adultery with five men, including young Master Smeaton. In the eyes of the world, that meant that Anne was a whore, as the Lady Mary said. Certainly, from the look in the Lady Mary’s eyes, she had no trouble believing it. Any of it.
     
    “Tell me, Lady de Brett, how is the abbess these days? She is your aunt now that you are married to Sir Richard, is she not?” Lady Exeter asked, eager to change the subject. “She was a greatly admired lady when she was in charge of Rivers Abbey. I hope she is well and . . . happy in her new life.”
    Bridg et smiled at her, grateful that the talk had shifted onto safer ground. “Yes, she is my lady, and I can also assure you that she is in very good health. She largely eschews London and spends as much of her time as possible in the country at our house in Lincolnshire. She says it reminds her of the abbey. She loves it there.”
     
    “Ah yes, I had quite forgotten, thank you for reminding me Lady Exeter! Joan de Brett was the abbess at Rivers. We were both so sad, my mother and I, when it was suppressed. My mother had visited it, you know, and met the abbess a number of times. She held her in great regard and recognised her as a woman who maintained a very strong faith in the power of the Church. My mother always admired that in a person. Tell me do you, Lady de Brett, still adhere to the true religion?”
     
    Bridget swallowed and touched the pearl cross that hung about her neck. Here, yet again, the Lady Mary had led her into dangerous territory, made all the more perilous since the rising of last year, an event which people had taken to calling the Pilgrimage of Grace. It had started not far from their property of New Place in Lincolnshire and had quickly spread and gathered momentum as more and more people took the chance to express their anger at the king’s radical religious changes, namely his break from Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as many other grievances they held against him and his advisors. Many people loved their churches and cherished their traditions. They did not want to see them altered in any way let alone cast aside or driven into utter oblivion. The rebellion’s leader had been a man called Robert Aske and he had managed to attract not just commoners but a number of nobles to the cause as well. They had all marched proudly under a banner