The body of the building, too, contained ancient, history-haunted corners. A series of rooms was credited to the design and the occupation of Queen Isabel. Here the She-Wolf of France, old Queen Jezebel, had dwelt with the lover whom she nearly seated on the throne of England. A traditional portrait of her still gazed out across the rooms she had owned, a stiff daub on a wooden panel, giving the fierce, tight-lipped stare of the adventuress, high-boned, pink-cheeked, archaic in drawing, angular, convincing in its very primitiveness of workmanship--jewelled and furred there and here in dimmed patches of colour that had once been crudely brilliant. Brakelond had been the scene of Queen Isabel’s highest fortunes. Her ghost still seemed to hold the high halls of her prosperity, her pitiless spirit dominated that wing which owed its life to her. This was her true burial-place--rather than Castle Rising, where at last, after all the changes of her eventful life, she died, old, fat, monstrous, honoured in dishonour, incredibly wealthy, the first millionaire of Europe. Dark and dusty were the windings of the Castle corridors--dark and dusty as the winding paths of Mortimer and Isabel. The building had been put together from time to time, added to, built on to, with no thought of conformity, of harmony, of convenience. It was rather a congeries of Castles than one unanimous edifice. From far off it was seen as a single fabric; within its walls the daunted visitor could gain comfort from noticing its many discordancies, the innumerable violent breaks in the continuity of its development. There was no complete rhythm in the building’s design; part clashed with part, and in the jarring conflict of tastes and periods the enchantment which distance had lent was shattered by the sudden onslaughts of criticism. Here jutted out a Georgian wing, solid and stiff, but ill-attuned to the austere majesty of the great Drum Tower. There, a Duke of the eighteenth century, a friend of Pope and Lady Mary, had erected a Chinese pagoda, that perked impertinently up with its fantastic, saucy eaves among the stalwart turrets that had frowned on Edward of York, and given vain shelter to Marguerite of Anjou. Then, again, another Duke, contemporary of George the Glorious, had appended to the Elizabethan front of the Castle a small but accurate copy of the Brighton Pavilion. Its wriggling cupolas, its fluted minarets, shone white with plaster, and its main plantation of bulbs, like gigantic onions, bulged and swelled beneath an oriel whence the Virgin Queen had watched a masque.