“You are my little girl, aren’t you, Gretna?” she asked once as she had held her in a close embrace and accepted the buttercups that Gretna had picked for her in the meadow outside the cottage door.

“Of course I am,” Gretna replied. “But why do you not have a little girl of your own just like me?”

Both Mistress Fitzherbert and her mother had laughed, but Gretna had seen the pain on Aunt Maria’s face and had been intuitive enough never to mention her childless state to her again.

What had Lord Wroxhall meant when he said that a number of people believed that the Prince of Wales had married her?

Gretna might be innocent, she might have lived outside this world, but she was a Protestant and she was well aware from her close association with Mistress Fitzherbert’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Smythe, that Roman Catholics had a very difficult time.

Deprived of their Civil Rights, treated as aliens and suspects in the land of their birth, they were forced to practise their religion almost by stealth. Their Priests lived in fear and their Chapels were bolted before the Mass began in order to keep out spies.

Maria’s two brothers, John and Frederick, were not allowed to enter the Army or Navy and they were debarred from holding any form of Office under the Crown.

How often Gretna had heard her father and mother say how unfair their position was and that it was not surprising that the two young men were very wild in consequence.

Their father, Mr. Walter Smythe, had held a Commission in the Austrian Army and finally John had gone abroad and enlisted, much to the distress and unhappiness of his parents.

“I think our treatment of the Roman Catholics in this country is monstrously unfair!”

Gretna could hear her mother saying this in her soft sweet voice, but with her eyes a little fiery as they were when she heard of any injustice and cruelty.

“I know, my dearest,” her husband replied. “But there has been so much religious trouble in the past that Parliament has done its best to stamp out religious differences by preventing the Roman Catholics from getting into any position from which they could antagonise their compatriots.”

“I should have thought,” Gretna’s mother said angrily, “that treating them as we do was just the way to cause not only unhappiness but differences, arguments and even revolution.”

“Hush, hush, Rosemary,” he cried, “I cannot allow you to say such sentiments aloud. It is almost treason.”

“Then I will be treasonable,” his wife hit back, her pretty head held high. “When I think how kind the Smythes are and what good friends they have been to us, then I am prepared to fight their battles and support their cause, even if it means defying the King himself.”