Rosa turned and walked from the room without a word, pausing only to pick up Cookie’s ball, then closing the door quietly behind her. She went straight outside to the aviary where the ravens were kept. Since moving to Raven Hall, Rosa had come to appreciate that a garden could be a solace to the soul, and she spent much of her time outside. The aviary was one of the most beautiful buildings she’d ever seen. The sprawling cast-iron structure took its inspiration from the trelliswork pavilions of palatial French gardens, like those at Versailles. The ravens fluttered and swooped between their perches in the lofty space overhead as soon as Rosa entered the building.

An unkindness …

That was the collective noun for them. It seemed strangely fitting for the birds that lived at Raven Hall. Still, Rosa liked them and had taken to spending a great deal of time in the aviary recently, even using it as a sort of workshop to sketch out her clockwork designs. Most days it was bitterly cold, but today she preferred to be bundled up in her winter furs with the birds than inside the same mansion as Eustace.

She went over to the feeding station and dipped the ravens’ biscuits in bowls of blood, just as they liked them. They descended in a flurry of black wings, silken as petticoats. Yes, Rosa thought. The ravens would work perfectly well for what she had in mind.

Using the feeding station as a makeshift desk, she pulled out the workbook and pencils she’d stored there. Recently she had been working on plans for a winter carousel. She had adored them ever since riding one as a child at the Mechanical Museum on Coney Island, and had entire sketchbooks filled with hundreds of designs. For years she had dreamed of creating a spectacular carousel of her own – something that was more than mere cogs and clockwork, something that was truly magical. It was the dream that had first ignited her interest in becoming an artificer, even though everyone said it was a domain that women should not enter.

In her latest clockwork sketch the horses all had silver ribbons in their manes – all except one, which had a golden ribbon instead. The gold-ribboned horse was special somehow, in a way Rosa had not yet worked out. There were sleighs and polar bears on the carousel too, and twists of ice that hung down from the circular roof and dripped from the horses’ flailing hooves.