‘Thank you for visiting the pleasure garden,’ the footman said as they filed out. ‘If you were fortunate enough to be invited to the supper booths, then please make yourself known to my colleague by the Rose Gate. Otherwise, your carriages await to take you home, and Lady Beatrice sincerely hopes you had an enchanting evening and that you will visit the garden again soon.’

Rosa looked round to where another footman waited beside the gate with the ice roses. A few people holding blue-and-cream teacups already clustered around him. Rosa walked over to join them and, soon enough, there were perhaps forty guests assembled there.

‘I believe that’s everyone,’ the footman said. ‘If you are all ready, then please follow me.’

Rosa expected them to pass under the Rose Gate and walk back through the garden, but instead the footman took them round the corner of the house to where a second gate waited. Like the first one, this formed an archway, but rather than being decorated with ice roses, it was adorned all over with fat, ripe plums. Their purple skins showed through coats of frost that were like sparkling crystals of sugar.

The footman stepped back, waving a gloved hand at the arch. ‘Please do go through,’ he said. ‘On the other side of the Plum Gate you will find servers waiting to escort you to your tables.’

A hedged walkway stretched beyond the gate, making it impossible to see what was coming up ahead, but Rosa thought she heard the soft splash of fountains and the trilling call of a songbird. Just off the path, a single golden feather lay on the snow, impossibly bright and beautiful – the most golden thing that could exist in the world. As she followed the other guests through in a whisper of cloaks and anticipation, Rosa clasped her teacup a little more tightly in her hands, partly thrilled and partly dreading what new enchantments she might find beyond.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Having already spent an hour exploring the gardens, the other guests were in such a state of excitement that the icy air seemed to crackle with it. They hurried down the path, greedy for more wintry delights, not even pausing to notice the magic along the way, but Rosa’s gaze took in everything.

The path was lined with ornamental bramble, only these weren’t fat, white berries gleaming within the bright winter bark, but elegant spiders with legs pale as milk. When Rosa peered more closely, she saw that they were spinning webs of frosted gold between the branches, and a quick glance at her guidebook told her that these spiders didn’t catch flies in their webs, but bad dreams instead.