She had no idea whether this was true. In all likelihood it was the ravens keeping him to his room, although they had never prevented him from moving about the house before. At any rate, she was not going to send for a doctor unless it proved absolutely necessary. In the meantime she was pleased to have the pleasure garden to herself. It was harder for people to congratulate Eustace if he wasn’t there. Yet there seemed to be excited talk of Beatrice’s garden everywhere.

Rosa had hoped that the incident with Eustace at the supper booths might have put people off. After all, if even the Duke of Chalkley could be publicly disgraced in such a manner, then so could anyone. It was not as if the plums were even pleasant to eat. Yet she was forgetting that the only thing people loved more than something magical and beautiful was something cruel and monstrous.

And so guests flocked to Beatrice’s garden in the hope of getting into the notorious supper booths. It did not matter that most people did not want to eat the plums themselves, or were even capable of doing so. There was always the possibility that someone else might, and that there would be a delicious scandal. Either way, there were clearly plenty of people who thought Beatrice’s garden a wonder far more spectacular than Rosa’s clockwork reindeer, or her carousel, or her frost fair. What if the Spider Queen agreed with them?

She racked her brain for how she could make her own garden more wondrous. There were still two days left before the competition ended. Still two more days to make any final improvements that might give her the edge she needed. She was sure that the answer lay with the carousel. She knew it could be so much more than it currently was. She could feel its potential every time she looked at it, sparkling and beautiful in the middle of the frozen lake. Yet she could not quite work out what it was that needed to be different, or how she might turn it into the Carousel of Icicles from the book.

She had already spent many hours over the past months tinkering with its inner mechanisms, attempting to transform it from something that allowed one to merely relive the past into something that could actually change what had happened. That would surely be something to rival Beatrice’s plums. She returned over and over again to the pop-up book, skimming through the pages looking for the carousel, but it remained stubbornly absent, as did the boy who sometimes haunted the mansion’s corridors.