‘Nothing can be changed,’ he said. ‘Whatever memory you choose, everything will be exactly as it was.’

‘H-H-How—’ Beatrice tried to force out a question, but the words stuck in her throat.

‘How does it work?’ a gentleman said over her.

‘When you take your seat on the horse, you think of the memory you’d most like to revisit and the horse will take you there. If you haven’t thought of anything before the music starts, then the horse will choose a moment for you. Whatever it believes will bring you joy.’

‘Are the horses alive then?’ a nearby woman asked. ‘I thought they were clockwork?’

‘You will have to judge that for yourself, madam.’

Beatrice looked at the size of the queue. There must have been a hundred people waiting, but there were at least twenty horses on the carousel and each ride seemed to last only two or three minutes. It would not take long to have a turn, although she sensed that people would have waited for hours on the frozen lake, if that was what it took. She felt her heart sink. If the Carousel of Icicles really did what Rosa claimed it could do, then Beatrice’s plum trees must surely lose some of their wonder in comparison. What could the other lives you might have lived matter, when compared with the chance to return to a cherished memory from this life? One you had thought gone forever. Why, if it worked, then Beatrice would be able to see her mother again!

The yearning was so fierce that it seemed almost impossible to stand in the line and wait. When Beatrice joined the back of the queue, she felt the great urge to push her way to the front, quite certain that her wish to revisit the past must be far more urgent than anyone else’s. But all around her she could hear the other guests discussing which moment they would return to. Their wedding day, or a precious childhood memory, or a meeting with a lost loved one – a parent, or a sibling, or a spouse. It seemed that everyone, no matter their age or position or how much unhappiness they had experienced, had had some past moment of joy that they longed to experience again.

And so as Beatrice got closer to the front of the queue, she felt a curious mixture of hope and dread. She wanted so desperately to see her mother, but she knew it would be very bad for her own chances of winning the competition if she was able to do so. In addition, she found it almost impossible to choose a particular moment to return to. There were so many good times before her mother became ill, and it seemed too hard to pick one at the expense of losing all the rest.