Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,2

her little chest had swelled and how she had smiled with pride when he’d said those words: Chief Rat Catcher. She had liked the sound of that. Everyone knew that rodents were a big problem in a place like Biltmore, with all its sheds and shelves and barns and whatnot. And it was true that she had shown a natural-born talent for snatching the cunning, food-stealing, dropping-leaving, disease-infected four-legged vermin that so eluded the adult folk with their crude traps and poisons. Mice, which were timid and prone to panic-induced mistakes at key moments, were no trouble at all for her to catch. It was the rats that gave her the scamper each night, and it was on the rats that she had honed her skills. She was twelve years old now. And that was who she was: Serafina, C.R.C.

But as she watched the two rats run into the forest, a strange and powerful feeling took hold of her. She wanted to follow them. She wanted to see what they saw beneath leaf and twig, to explore the rocks and dells, the streams and wonders. But her pa had forbidden her.

“Never go into the forest,” he had told her many times. “There are dark forces there that no one understands, things that ain’t natural and can do ya wicked harm.”

She stood at the edge of the forest and looked as far as she could into the trees. For years, she’d heard stories of people who got lost in the forest and never returned. She wondered what dangers lurked there. Was it black magic, demons, or some sort of heinous beasts? What was her pa so afraid of?

She might bandy back and forth with her pa about all sorts of things just for the jump of it—like refusing her grits, sleeping all day and hunting all night, and spying on the Vanderbilts and their guests—but she never argued about this. She knew when he said those words he was as serious as her dead momma. For all the spiny talk and all the sneak-about, sometimes you just stayed quiet and did what you were told because you sensed it was a good way to keep breathing.

Feeling strangely lonesome, she turned away from the forest and gazed back at the estate. The moon rose above the steeply pitched slate roofs of the house and reflected in the panes of glass that domed the Winter Garden. The stars sparkled above the mountains. The grass and trees and flowers of the beautiful manicured grounds glowed in the midnight light. She could see every detail, every toad and snail and all the other creatures of the night. A lone mockingbird sang its evening song from a magnolia tree, and the baby hummingbirds, tucked into their tiny nest among the climbing wisteria, rustled in their sleep.

It lifted her chin a bit to think that her pa had helped build all this. He’d been one of the hundreds of stonemasons, woodcarvers, and other craftsmen who had come to Asheville from the surrounding mountains to construct Biltmore Estate years before. He had stayed on to maintain the machinery. But when all the other basement workers went home to their families each night, he and Serafina hid among the steaming pipes and metal tools in the workshop like stowaways in the engine room of a great ship. The truth was they had no place else to go, no kin to go home to. Whenever she asked about her momma, her father refused to talk about her. So, there wasn’t anyone else besides her and her pa, and they’d made the basement their home for as long as she could remember.

“How come we don’t live in the servants’ quarters or in town like the other workers, Pa?” she had asked many times.

“Never ya mind about that,” he would grumble in reply.

Over the years, her pa had taught her how to read and write pretty well, and told her plenty of stories about the world, but he was never too keen on talking about what she wanted to talk about, which was what was going on deep down in his heart, and what happened to her momma, and why she didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and why she and her pa didn’t have any friends who came ’round to call. Sometimes, she wanted to reach down inside him and shake him up to see what would happen, but most of the time her pa just slept all night and worked