When Beatrice persisted with her tales, he finally sent for doctors who talked of unsound minds, female hysteria and trauma brought on by grief. The treatments seemed more like punishments, so Beatrice retracted her story, admitting that she’d made it all up for attention. Anything to make the doctors go away, to escape their penetrating gazes, pitiless and cold-eyed as reptiles. The garden would simply have to remain a treasured memory for her, one that she occasionally took out to silently marvel over, holding it as carefully as one of her beloved children’s books filled with fairy tales and happy endings.

That afternoon she sat in the White Drawing Room of Raven Hall, frowning down at the blood opal on her ring finger. Her fiancé, Eustace Hamilton, Duke of Chalkley, had placed it there when he made her the envy of all her acquaintances four months ago, but still she was not accustomed to it, found its weight strange and unwelcome, like a devil’s eye staring insolently back at her.

‘The bad-luck stone,’ her lady’s maid had whispered, looking aghast when she first saw it. Remembering herself, the girl had quickly apologised and haltingly attempted to admire the ring, but it was the first sentiment that had been true to her heart.

Against the black silk of Beatrice’s mourning gown, the stone seemed to glow redder and hotter, full of sparks and fireworks and erupting volcanoes. She knew that opals were considered unlucky by many, but this ring had been in Eustace’s family for centuries, worn by generations of bejewelled, beautiful duchesses. And superstitions aside, it wasn’t the ring that was the problem. It wasn’t even the man. It was the proposal itself.

At twenty-five, Beatrice knew she was not like other women. Her heart did not flutter when a man placed his hand on her waist at a dance. She had never longed for any particular gentleman to glance her way. Love poems left her as cold as the mossed, marble statues in her home’s manicured gardens.

She knew the role that was expected of her – the flirting with fans, the sly sideways glances, the coquettish teasing, the eyelash-fluttering. It was simply that she’d never experienced the slightest romantic interest in any person, no matter how eligible. On the contrary, how dull the men all seemed to her, with their blustering, and their posturing, and their fragile egos.