Occasionally some careless person would stand in the train’s way, causing it to hoot out an indignant blast on its whistle. Even when it was blocked by skirts and trousers, it was possible to mark the train’s progress by the small puffs of smoke drifting up from its funnel.

And there were dozens of clocks. Within a glittering maze of mirrors Beatrice found a wall of skeleton clocks with their innards exposed, pale and smooth as bone. Guests were invited to wind them and, when they did so, their double in the mirror aged before their eyes. It was both horrible and fascinating, and it did not stop until only the bones of a grinning skeleton stared back from behind the glass.

Beatrice hurried out of the hall of mirrors as quickly as she could. Next were the impossible clocks, which drifted through the air like snowflakes and had a most startling effect every time they chimed out the quarter-hour. Anyone who happened to be touching the clock when it chimed would be able, for a brief time, to see the garden as it had once been. Some saw it looking as it had only a year or so ago, others saw the fateful night when the clockwork boar had run amok, whilst a few even saw garden parties from a hundred years past.

And, of course, there were animals, all made from clockwork. Rosa had rebuilt her peacocks, which strutted through the grounds shedding their sparkling sapphire light over everything. Beatrice spent some time watching a fire magician perform various tricks, to the delight of the watching crowd, along with a couple of fire acrobats performing stunts on stilts whilst balancing precariously atop a tightrope strung between two trees.

Beatrice felt a little anxious watching them. She’d seen more than one performer suffer an accident at Vauxhall. It was easy to get distracted by the flashing lights of fireworks or the noise of the crowd. It was one of the reasons she’d never even considered hiring human performers for her own garden. In her opinion, the plants and flowers ought to be more than enough, but she suddenly worried that people might find her quiet candlelit grounds a little dull compared to all this fire and dazzling showmanship.

The heat from the magician and acrobats was overpowering and she took out her fan. But it seemed that this was all part of the act too. As soon as she opened it, the ivory sticks folded back to reveal clockwork innards. There were exclamations of delight all around as the fans folded over and over again, rearranging themselves until they were no longer fans at all, but birds with bright-red plumage. They flew from the ladies’ hands to join the magician, forming part of his next act as they cartwheeled through the sky, releasing miniature fireworks that filled the air above their heads with glowing red stars.