Refuse to marry until you are old enough to know your own mind and heart. I advise you to wait until you are at least twenty or more, for which you will be condemned as an old maid but heed not the jibes. Learn your likes and dislikes. I have always encouraged this in you and your father has allowed you an education. Never gamble with your life or those of others.

Cast your net wisely. Know that I love you and will do so beyond death.

Your ever-loving mama,

Frances Carr

“The poisons were thrown away?” asked Barbara, very quietly. Her eyes had suddenly filled with tears although she had not cried for her mother in a decade.

“It seems so, although my mother wanted to die nonetheless; she felt responsible for the deaths of four people, including your mother. She often said she was dead while living. She loved me but was sometimes so melancholy she could not show it.”

“She married the man she chose,” said Barbara, but the Countess turned away and stared through the window. After a long silence she looked again at Barbara.

“My father refused to speak to her after their trials. The King pardoned her quickly for her apparent contrition, but she stayed with my father in the Tower for six years, until he was also released. He blamed his fall on her and they were never reconciled. The only thing in her life of which she was proud was me, and of the fact that her annulment did a little to change the opinions of some on the matter of arranged marriages, despite the outrage it caused then and still does.” The Countess laughed despite her tears, and her visitor saw in her the same defiance that had been evident in her mother.

Barbara hesitated to mention the Earl of Essex, in case Lady Anne found the subject distasteful, but she was intrigued to hear how Frankie had received the news of his second marriage. It had taken seventeen years for him to consider it; so great and vociferous was his prejudice against women.

“My mother tried to warn Elizabeth Pawlett against marrying him, but my father forbade her. I am not happy that Essex’s second marriage ended as disastrously as his first, but my mother had some satisfaction in their separation after only one year, for it proved his inability to make a wife happy.”

The newsmongers had made the whole country aware that Elizabeth Pawlett had conceived a child six years after her wedding and that her husband accused her of infidelity and said he would disown the baby unless it was born by a certain date. It was, and he grudgingly acknowledged his only child, a son and heir. The boy died a month later, along with the last vestiges of the marriage. After Essex’s death, his widow remarried and bore two healthy daughters.

“You, at least, have married a man you love?”