She was wildly glad to be alone, to drop, for a moment, the mask of composed gaiety that she ever kept over her anxiety.
Door after door she opened, and room after room she traversed, until she reached a little winding stairway that led to a chamber in one of the fine red turrets with the graceful decorated chimney-stacks that Sir Christopher was so calmly destroying.
Stairway and chamber were both covered with thick white dust; the bolts on the door were rusty and loose; there was no furniture save an old rotting chest, rudely carved; but the walls were beautifully panelled with oak in a linen pattern, and the low lancet window disclosed a perfect view.
Mary went straight to it, leant her sick head against the mullions, and gazed over the fair prospect of unkept garden, field, meadow, and river, all shimmering under a July sun. The Thames showed argent gold between banks of willow and alder; stretches of daisies, buttercups, clover, and poppies reached to distant groves of elm, oak, and beech.
In the nearer glades deer wandered in and out of the sweeping shadows, and the air was soft with the whispers of the ringdove.
Such a different England this seemed from that England shown in London, so far removed from war and discord, danger and alarm.
The lonely young Queen felt her own desolation heightened by the solitude; she became almost afraid of the silence.
When she reflected that the person who was everything to her was distant, exposed to many perils, that her father was opposed to him in battle, that the great responsibility of government was intrusted to her, and that she had no one on whom she could rely or even to whom open her heart (for William Bentinck had, after all, been summoned to Holland), she felt a melancholy creep over her spirit that was near despair.
The sun was warm on the sill where her hand rested and on her cheek; she leant a little farther out of the narrow window, that had neither glass nor casement, and fixed her eyes on the pulsing flow of the river.
A little sound behind her caused her to turn quickly with a nervous start.