The girl was about eight years old, with a solemn face and very dark hair. She wore a mourning dress and her black parasol was trimmed with dark lace and hung loosely from her hand, the tip dragging in the deep drifts of sparkling snow that surrounded them. It so glittered with minute crystals of ice and frost that Beatrice felt sure the canvas would feel cold if she touched it.

And, indeed, she couldn’t help herself. She crossed the room to do just that. There was only oil and canvas beneath her fingertips, yet the painting’s spell seemed to blaze right out of the frame at her. The skeletal forest surrounding the girl and the tiger was just as she remembered it, hung with glass angels and sparkling sugar mice. Pale spiders spun their dreams between the long white branches and she could even see the corner of the ice house at the edge of the frame.

‘Images of this child appear time and again in connection with the Winter Garden,’ James said. ‘Sometimes in paintings. At other times it’s in picture books. There was a bronze statuette once. And the painted lid of a music box. The girl is you, of course. I recognised her immediately.’ He looked at her closely. ‘We were friends back then. Why did you not tell me you were the first visitor to the garden?’

Beatrice looked at him with a frown. ‘F-First v-visitor?’

He indicated the brass plaque at the bottom of the painting. It read: The Tiger of Stars and the First Visitor.

Beatrice stared. The girl was certainly her, but she’d had no idea that she was the garden’s first visitor.

‘You didn’t know?’ James asked.

Beatrice shook her head.

He frowned. ‘Then you are not aware of the myths that surround the first visitor, either?’ At her blank look, he went on. ‘She is supposed to be important to the garden somehow, and to the tiger.’

Beatrice’s mind went to the invitation in her bedroom upstairs and the opportunity it offered. Before she could mention it, the servants brought in the tea tray that she had organised.

‘Are we having tea?’ James looked surprised. His eye fell upon the walnut cake and he suddenly looked strangely pleased. ‘You remembered,’ he said, glancing at Beatrice.

For some reason she felt suddenly flustered. Was it an odd thing to have remembered? Did it make her look a little pathetic? She frowned and, rather brusquely, invited him to be seated. Then she dismissed the servants. Of course there ought to have been a chaperone present, but this was not a conversation Beatrice wanted overheard.

‘Well, this is cosy.’ James raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s the occasion?’

Beatrice plunged straight in. ‘I p-plan to open a p-pleasure g-garden,’ she said. ‘Here. At Half M-Moon House. And I w-will n-need flowers. The m-most spectacular and b-beautiful in the w-world. Wonderful enough. To impress. The S-Spider Queen herself.’