This chapter argues that although Mary was dead before building work at Hardwick New Hall had been begun or probably even thought of, her many complaints about her time at Tutbury Castle shaped Bess’s approach to building and equipping her new house. There seems to be a portrait of Mary in the suite of hangings depicting five famous women from classical history and mythology, emblematising how Bess and Mary spoke to and with each other through cloth. What Bess learned from Mary is particularly visible in her portal figures, which not only hang close to real entrances but offer entrances into imagined spaces. Far from ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’, walls were places of extreme importance, with hangings not only keeping the temperature of the house comfortable but also offering symbolic significance. The size of some hangings may even have dictated the design of the house’s top storey, and there is a recurrent and energising tension between the idea of walls as boundaries of domestic space and walls as windows onto a wider world. The heroines of the Five Noble Women suite encoded meanings both personal and public, and their past lives as religious textiles were also in play.