Over the next days and weeks she started work on her own carousel once again. If there was a way to create such a thing, she was determined that she would achieve it. Here, at last, was a way out. She would put right the ghastly mistake she had been fool enough to make. Meanwhile her clockwork ravens did an excellent job of shielding her from Eustace. As she had promised, the birds themselves were rarely seen, but their shadows were an ever-present sight in Raven Hall, and you could often hear them scrabbling in the chimneys or scratching around in the gables.

Eustace couldn’t bear them and fled to his London town house, but Rosa sent a few of the birds there after him, determined that he would not get off that easily. And if the servants whispered of reports that the duke frequently woke from nightmares that left him screaming and sweating with terror, well, so much the better. It was no less than he deserved.

She wrote several letters to Beatrice, admitting that she had found the pop-up book and explaining that it appeared to be enchanted. Sometimes the Carousel of Icicles page was there and sometimes it wasn’t. She enquired about Beatrice’s own search for the Winter Garden but, strangely, she never heard anything back from her friend – the clockwork pigeon always returned empty-handed.

There was little time to dwell on this, however, because Rosa was so busy working on her carousel. It was by far the largest undertaking she had ever attempted. There was no chance of it being completed before the baby arrived. So far she had constructed only four basic horses and one polar bear, but there did not seem to be anything special or magical about them at all, and she despaired at ever re-creating the carousel from the pop-up book. And she still couldn’t understand how her design could have appeared within its pages in the first place. Yet it seemed she had no choice but to keep on with her work, in the blind faith that, eventually, she would create something magical.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

August 1837

Beatrice sat in the doctor’s surgery and waited for her name to be called. It had felt like giving up, to return to England, but her bleak mood wasn’t lifting and she had finally admitted defeat. She had never been brave enough to seek help before. Perhaps it was simply a matter of asking. She had to try at least, although she shuddered at the thought of attempting to describe the dark, hopeless moods that sometimes descended upon her. The broken angel’s wing. The chains that bound her to the bed. The despair that she would never feel any better.