Dear Beatrice,

You are cordially invited to the Winter Garden.

Open only at thirteen o’clock.

Should you care to attend, simply follow the dancing mushrooms.

Fondest regards,

The Spider Queen

Beatrice stared at the words for barely a moment before shoving the invitation inside her pocket and grabbing a coat from the wardrobe. She stuffed her feet into shoes and socks as she stumbled towards the door. She had no idea where her gloves and winter bonnet were kept, so she snatched up her mourning parasol instead.

She threw open the door of her bedroom and immediately saw a single golden mushroom glowing in the corridor beyond. Before her eyes, another one sprouted a little further down the corridor – growing up right out of the parquet floor – and then another and another. They ran all the way to the staircase, as if they were guiding her out of the house. As soon as she laid eyes on them, they began to twirl gently on the spot, like spinning tops.

Beatrice hurried down the corridor. The golden mushrooms led her to the second floor, where she took the Adam and Eve staircase to the ground level. The mushrooms suddenly uprooted themselves and danced along the floor beside her, casting golden glitters over the Sèvres vases and glinting off the rotting fruit and withered flowers of the Dutch still-life paintings upon the walls.

Finally they led Beatrice right to the Winter Smoking Room on the ground floor. She fumbled with the bolts and, at last, threw open the door and stumbled out onto the veranda. No stuffy summer air embraced her – instead, the world beyond the house was cold and crisp as a fresh-fallen autumn apple.

Beatrice took it in and gaped. All afternoon her guilt and grief had been as ravenous as twin black rats, gnawing away at her insides, but she forgot them when faced with the spectacle of the twinkling garden before her. The skeletal trees proudly wore their winter crowns and glass lanterns hung from bare branches, flickering like something from a fairy world. The air smelled of snow, and magic, and steaming cups of hot chocolate. Beatrice ran down the steps into it, her boots crunching in deep drifts of perfect white snow, her breath fogging the air before her.

It seemed as though she spent many hours exploring the magical garden, and yet when the ice clock rang for closing time there were thirteen chimes just as before, and the sky did not appear to have lightened at all. It was almost as if the garden existed in its own little pocket of time and none had passed whilst she’d been gone.

Beatrice reluctantly returned to the house with the taste of drinking chocolate melting on her tongue and her fingers sticky from sugarplums. By the time she reached her bedroom and went to the window, now empty of leaves, the Winter Garden had vanished.