There was some murmuring from some members of the family, but for The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and his three children, it was silent.
For the adults, the silence was due to the worry. The worry about the children and how they were going to deal with not just what was waiting for them in London, but the lasting effects of the death of their mother.
For the children, it was due to the grief. The three of them were sat together, William and Harry on one side of the seats and Bella on the other side, but none of them had said a word. William was far too engrossed with the pattern of the seat in front of him, Harry was staring down at the table separating him and his sister, and Bella was staring out of the window, eyes unfocused on the countryside that they were speeding through.
Bella didn't know what to expect. Going outside the gates to Balmoral had been bad enough, but apparently London was manic. She had seen a picture of some flowers outside the gates of Kensington Palace on a newspaper but that was it...the rest was completely unknown.
♔♕
She took a tight hold of her fathers hand, the breeze making her knee-length black dress float lightly as she stepped out of the car. She could feel the crowd watching her, watching them all. It was like they were all holding their breath, waiting for something to happen.
Bella hadn't cried yet today, but her eyes were still bright with unshed tears. She bit her lip as she glanced over the hundreds, no, thousands of bouquets at the gates of Kensington Palace.
She couldn't fathom the idea that her mother wasn't inside waiting for her. That she would never be able to run up to her after coming home from school, shouting about the newest thing she had learnt that day. Or that she would never be able to just rest against her whilst reading her newest book.
Whilst they had been up in Balmoral it hadn't seemed real, like they were living in some sort of nightmare. She was used to being apart from her mother, used to being in Scotland without her. But London, London was where her mum was. It was where Bella had lived with her. And the idea that their apartment inside the palace didn't have their mother inside. Well, it was only when she looked at the palace for the first time that it seemed real. Her mum wasn't there anymore. She never would be.
Her lip began to quiver as the sheer enormousness of what had happened fell upon her shoulders. She forced herself to take her gaze away from the curtains of their apartment and to the ground, or the trees or something that didn't remind her of her mum.
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Her father gently begin to tug her forwards, looking down with surprise as she brought herself as close to him as she could. Placing an arm around her shoulder, they walked towards the flowers that were resting at the gates. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do, were they just reading the messages or something else? Taking a glance at her brothers, she saw that they had bent down to read some of them, so she did the same.
