CHAPTER V LIFE AT HAMPTON COURT Our apartments were situated in the older, or Wolseyan, portion of the building, not in the square edifice which Sir Christopher Wren built for Dutch William. The architect’s monogram may still be found over a small door in Fountain Court, to mark where he lodged. Our windows looked out on the Chapel Court on one side, and Tennis Court Lane on the other; and under those windows I often listened of a summer’s night, with mingled pride and rapture, to a quartette of serenaders, who sang there in Mary’s honour. Those beautiful boyish voices which still echo in my ears, and make sweet, sad music in my memory! Frank and Charlie Sheridan, Cavendish Boyle and Alfred Montgomery.[13] Alas! only one of that little band now remains to whom I can say, “Do you remember?” And alas! once more, those dear old rooms, the scene of so many happy days; they were totally destroyed by fire, through the wanton carelessness of a housemaid, in 1886. The Sheridans were our dearest friends, and as some of their windows faced some of ours, we invented a code of signals for our own convenience. How many assignations were made, how many fishing parties, how many boating expeditions, how many rehearsals! Yes, I “have had playmates, I have had companions; all—all are gone, the old familiar faces,” the forms have vanished and their voices hushed before their time. One of that dear company passed away but a few short years ago; she wrote to me just before her death, to say, “She felt as if the daisy quiet were slowly stealing over her.” I am speaking now of Georgina, Duchess of Somerset, in whose limpid blue eyes and matchless smile I could trace, lingering to the last, the charms of the “Queen of Love and Beauty,”[14] and wonder that her undoubted claim to that proud title were ever questioned. Alas! of all the members of that generation of two loving families, I alone remain! Footnote 13: Alas! to say, Alfred Montgomery—most genial of critics as of playmates—died in 1896. Footnote 14: Jane Georgina, daughter of Thomas Sheridan, married, in 1830, Edward, twelfth Duke of Somerset, and died in 1884. As Lady St Maur she was the “Queen of Beauty” at the Eglinton tournament in 1839. It was in the cloisters, coming out of chapel, that I first saw, in a little brown frock, the future Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, now (1888) the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, and since that time every day of our re-meeting has been marked with a red-letter in my calendar. [Sidenote: QUEEN MARY’S GARDEN]