As the room darkened, the angel’s wing about her shoulders got heavier and heavier until it pinned her to the chair as effectively as any manacle. Beatrice sat there all night, dozing fitfully, dreaming about her mother and longing for the Winter Garden. She could sense pieces of herself floating away until she seemed to become someone else altogether: a stranger she barely knew. It frightened her to feel her own sense of who she was unravelling like a ball of string, until she teetered right on the edge of that familiar black pit – forever eager to swallow her whole once again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

June 1837

At last, the opening night of Eustace’s pleasure garden had arrived and the preparations had all been made. There were three hundred bottles of champagne, fifty barrels of porter, fifty baskets of strawberries, a thousand Eccles cakes and endless roast chickens. Fifteen different foreign wines were available from the cellar, from Burgundy to Spanish Fontcarrel. Coloured oil lamps lined the pebbled paths and tree-lined avenues, the supper booths were set up in a circle around the bandstand, and the orchestra was due to arrive later that day with their instruments.

During the Season Eustace liked to refer to his weekly party as a fête champêtre but, in truth, the only thing separating it from a common pleasure garden was the entrance price. The aristocratic guests enjoyed the exclusivity of such a venue – not having to rub shoulders with mantua-makers’ girls and grubby little lawyers’ clerks, to say nothing of fashionably dressed women of loose character and quick-fingered pickpockets. Opening night was the perfect opportunity for dealing Eustace the blow that Rosa had been itching to deliver for weeks.

That evening she was laced into her gown as tightly as her swelling stomach would permit. The champagne-coloured satin was decorated in beautiful floral sprays and gold-edged leaves, trimmed with lashings of blond lace, and fashionably left much of her arms and shoulders bare. It was exactly the kind of dress Rosa had imagined wearing as a duchess, but she found it hard to take any pleasure in it now.

Whilst her maid arranged her hair, Rosa watched the supper booths being set up on the lawn. The previous Season there had been magicians and mesmerists, as well as carefully staged poses plastiques, who resembled statues both in their dress and in their uncanny ability to remain utterly still for hours. Indeed, the guests had had quite a hard time distinguishing those performers from the garden’s actual statues.