“He thinks I am my mother,” said Lady Anne, picking up the bird, “so he is friendly to me; but he chases the dogs and savages strangers.” Gingerly, she placed the parrot on Barbara’s forearm. Prospero placidly sidestepped upward until he came to rest on her shoulder, whereat he tweaked her ear gently with his beak.

“He remembers you,” said the Countess.

“We spent a lot of time with him.” Emotion threatened to overcome Barbara then. Noticing this, Lady Anne replaced the bird on his perch and sat, inviting her visitor to do likewise.

Barbara had written to request an audience; it had been granted by return. Now she was surprised to see that the Countess appeared as anxious about their meeting as she was herself. Anne Russell, Countess of Bedford, born Anne Carr, had a famously happy marriage, five children, a sixth on the way and time for more to come, high titles and many houses; and yet she was unsettled by Barbara’s presence.

“I am very pleased you have come,” she said, a glimmer of her mother’s warmth behind her guarded expression.

Anne Turner’s final wish had been to tell Frankie that she never betrayed her, nor stopped loving her; but Barbara had blamed Frankie for her mother’s death. The anguish and grief that lingered long after the hanging had made it impossible to visit her. So, she had come to see her child.

“More than three decades have passed since events drew our mothers together,” said Lady Anne.

“This visit is prompted by the knowledge that I will soon meet my mother again,” Barbara said. As trained to secrecy and discretion as any courtier, Lady Anne gazed impassively at her guest, but Barbara knew she would be working hard to understand the full meaning of these words: that Barbara was ill and saw death ahead of her; that she believed her mother had been admitted to heaven but that she would not see Frankie there. The Countess got to her feet and Barbara regretted her choice of words, but Lady Anne did not quit the chamber. Instead, she sat beside her visitor and opened the locket that hung on a long chain around her neck, so that Barbara might see the miniatures it held.

“Taken from a portrait of my mother by Larkin. The original is lost.”

Lost? thought Barbara. Frankie had been decried as “the rotten branch that must be lopped from the noble tree” at her trial after Anne’s death. Events occurred soon afterward that brought down her family. Hers was not a portrait to hang in the long gallery but to throw on a bonfire. How could it have been for Anne, growing up in the shadow of so infamous a mother?