Queen Victoria’s picture hangs in the Silver Bush kitchen.

There were other pictures… Queen Victoria at her coronation and King William riding his white horse over the Boyne: a marble cross, poised on a dark rock in a raging ocean, lavishly garlanded with flowers, having a huge open Bible on a purple cushion at its foot: the Burial of the Pet Bird: mottoes worked in wool… Home Sweet Home… Upwards and Onwards. These had all been judged at successive spring cleanings to be unworthy of the other rooms but Judy wouldn’t have them burned. Pat wouldn’t have liked them anywhere else but she liked them on the walls of Judy’s kitchen. It wouldn’t have been quite the same without them.

-Pat of Silver Bush ch.4,3

Varvara was so funny and interesting and said such dreadful things about the picture of Queen Victoria on the dining-room wall.

“Doesn’t she look like somebody’s old cook with a lace curtain on her head?”

It was really a terrible chromo, originally sent out as a “supplement” with a Montreal paper and framed in hundreds of houses all over the loyal Island. It represented the good queen with a broad blue ribbon across her breast and a crown on her head filled with diamonds, the least of which was as big as a walnut. From the crown descended the aforesaid lace curtain around the face and bust of the queen, and what wasn’t lace curtain was diamonds–on ears and throat and breast and hand and arm. Marigold had always had much the same opinion as Varvara about it and had once expressed it. Only once. Grandmother had looked at her as if she had committed lese-majeste and said,

“That is Queen Victoria,” as if Marigold hadn’t known it.

But Marigold wasn’t going to have girls from the States coming in and making fun of the royal family.

“I don’t think you have any business to talk like that of our queen,” she said haughtily.

-Magic for Marigold ch.10

Queen Victoria in her Coronation Robes

Source

Wikipedia Commons. Online, Internet: http://www.mindspring.com/~mccarthys/denis/69ib053.htm