Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,3

all day, and cooked their dinner in the evening, and told her stories, and they had a pretty good life, the two of them, and she didn’t shake him because she knew he didn’t want to be shook, so she just let him be.

At night, when everyone else in the house went to sleep, she crept upstairs and snatched books to read in the moonlight. She’d overheard the butler boast to a visiting writer that Mr. Vanderbilt had collected twenty-two thousand books, only half of which fit in the Library Room. The others were stored on tables and shelves throughout the house, and to Serafina, these were like Juneberries ripe for the picking, too tempting to resist. No one seemed to notice when a book went missing and was back in its place a few days later.

She had read about the great battles between the states with tattered flags flying and she had read of the steaming iron beasts that hurtled people hither and yon. She wanted to sneak into the graveyard at night with Tom and Huck and be shipwrecked with the Swiss Family Robinson. Some nights, she longed to be one of the four sisters with their loving mother in Little Women. Other nights, she imagined meeting the ghosts of Sleepy Hollow or tapping, tapping, tapping with Poe’s black raven. She liked to tell her pa about the books she read, and she often made up stories of her own, filled with imaginary friends and strange families and ghosts in the night, but he was never interested in her tales of fancy and fright. He was far too sensible a man for all that and didn’t like to believe in anything but bricks and bolts and solid things.

More and more she wondered what it would be like to have some sort of secret friend who her pa didn’t know about, someone she could talk to about things, but she didn’t tend to meet too many children her age skulking through the basement in the dead of night.

A few of the low-level kitchen scullions and boiler tenders who worked in the basement and went home each night had seen her darting here or there and knew vaguely who she was, but the maids and manservants who worked on the main floors did not. And certainly the master and mistress of the house didn’t know she existed.

“The Vanderbilts are a good kind of folk, Sera,” her pa had told her, “but they ain’t our kind of folk. You keep yourself scarce when they come about. Don’t let anyone get a good look at you. And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone your name or who you are. You hear?”

Serafina did hear. She heard very well. She could hear a mouse change his mind. Yet she didn’t know exactly why she and her pa lived the way they did. She didn’t know why her father hid her away from the world, why he was ashamed of her, but she knew one thing for sure: that she loved him with all her heart, and the last thing she ever wanted to do was to cause him trouble.

So she had become an expert at moving undetected, not just to catch the rats, but to avoid the people, too. When she was feeling particularly brave or lonely, she darted upstairs into the comings and goings of the sparkling folk. She snuck and crept and hid. She was small for her age and light of foot. The shadows were her friends. She spied on the fancy-dressed guests as they arrived in their splendid horse-drawn carriages. No one upstairs ever saw her hiding beneath the bed or behind the door. No one noticed her in the back of the closet when they put their coats inside. When the ladies and gentlemen went on their walks around the grounds, she slinked up right next to them without them knowing and listened to everything they were saying. She loved seeing the young girls in their blue and yellow dresses with ribbons fluttering in their hair, and she ran along with them when they frolicked through the garden. When the children played hide-and-seek, they never realized there was another player. Sometimes she’d even see Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt walking arm in arm, or she’d see their twelve-year-old nephew riding his horse across the grounds, with his sleek black dog running alongside.

She had watched them all, but none of them ever saw her—not even the dog. Lately she’d been wondering