With the accession of Queen Mary to the throne and the return of Bishop Gardiner to the diocese his mother, also, had returned to her marital home and Clement had come to know her. She was a strikingly handsome woman. He had felt so proud of her. And indeed, it seemed to him that these were happy years. He would never forget his parents' gorgeous apparel when he was allowed to accompany them to Southampton to greet the King of Spain when he landed there to marry Mary Tudor. His mother's strong faith was well known, and she and her husband had been well received at the royal court.

There had even been a child born, Clement's sister Catherine. She was a pretty little girl. He had pushed her about in a small cart and she had loved him. But then Queen Mary had died and Elizabeth had come to the throne; and not long after, his mother had gone again, taking his sister with her.

His father would never say why she had left; nor, when they met, did his mother ever tell him much. But he supposed he could imagine.

'The Whore's Daughter'. That was how his mother always referred to the queen. To good Catholics, of course, King Henry's Spanish wife had been his only wife until she died. The charade of the divorce and remarriage, sanctioned by Henry's breakaway English Church, was nothing but a fraud. So Queen Anne Boleyn had never been married and her daughter Elizabeth was a bastard. Nor, for Clement's mother, could Queen Elizabeth's Church be of any interest. The Church that Elizabeth and her counsellor Cecil tried to create was a compromise. The queen did not claim to be its spiritual head but only its governor. Its doctrines were a sort of reformist Catholicism and on the vexed question of the Mass - whether or not a miracle took place and the bread and wine of the Eucharist actually became the body and blood of Christ - the English Church maintained a formula whose ambiguity was little short of genius.

But what was ambiguity to her? The Lady Albion knew she was right. And this, Clement assumed, was the reason for her departure. His father was kindly and, in his way, devout. But the Albion family had been making accommodations ever since the days of Cola the Huntsman, five hundred years before and Clement's mother despised compromise. She also despised her husband so she left. Perhaps, Clement thought, his father had been relieved to see her go.