It wasn’t her Eustace. His face was unmarked by the gash from the black apple tree and he was looking at her with an expression of polite interest. There was no resentment, or bitterness, or hatred at all. Yet, now that she knew it was there, Rosa could still see the boar lurking beneath his features.

‘Miss Warren,’ Eustace said, putting his hand on Beatrice’s shoulder. ‘My wife didn’t tell me you were here. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

Beatrice did not react to him at all.

‘I am s-sorry for your l-lot in l-life,’ she said. ‘But I want that w-wish as much as you d-do.’ Her eyes went to the spiders spinning around them. The gold webs glittered like ice in the dancing light from the fire. ‘And I have the r-right to put my own h-happiness f-f-first. Just as. You do.’

Rosa closed her eyes and rubbed them hard. When she opened them, Eustace and the boy were both gone. It was only her and Beatrice left in the room, and the white spiders spinning their extraordinary webs around them. She felt her shoulders slump a little. She had needed to try, but Beatrice’s response came as no surprise. A wish was such a wondrous thing to ask someone to give up. Perhaps there was no person alive in the world who would willingly give up a marvel like that.

She glanced through the window to where the pleasure garden sparkled beyond the glass. ‘Is it true about the plums?’ she asked. ‘Can they really reveal to us a mistake we have yet to make?’

Beatrice nodded.

‘How can we know it is not fated to happen anyway?’

‘It c-can be ch-changed,’ Beatrice said. ‘I have s-seen it. With J-James.’

‘James Sheppard?’

Beatrice nodded. ‘His p-plum stone said he would r-regret not proposing to J-Jani.’

‘Oh.’ Rosa felt a fierce rush of envy and sorrow, like a bird spreading its wings inside her, desperate to take flight. She grabbed it and squeezed its feathers together, sleek and slippery between her fingers. She would not think about James right now. She would not.

‘There is n-no such thing as f-fate,’ Beatrice said. ‘We always h-have the ch-chance to make things d-different.’

‘Not if you’re married,’ Rosa said flatly. ‘Then it’s too late to change anything at all. I should go. I would hate to miss my chance to sample the plums.’

‘B-Brace y-yourself,’ Beatrice said. ‘They t-taste of r-regret.’

Rosa paused at the door. ‘Regret has a taste?’

‘Y-Yes. But I c-cannot d-describe it.’

Rosa thought suddenly of the mourning orchid blooming for Esme back at the hothouse, its petals an entirely new colour that she had not known existed before. It would be an impossible task to describe it to anyone, and she supposed the plums must be the same. Some things in the world were so wondrous and extraordinary that you simply had to experience them for yourself.