Serafina and the Black Cloak

  Text copyright © 2015 by Robert Beatty

  Cover illustration © 2015 by Alexander Jansson

  Cover design by Maria Elias

  Designed by Maria Elias

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1511-6

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina, 1899

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To my wife, Jennifer, who helped shape

  this story from the beginning,

  and to our girls

  —Camille, Genevieve, and Elizabeth—

  who will always be our first and

  most important audience

  Biltmore Estate

  Asheville, North Carolina

  1899

  Serafina opened her eyes and scanned the darkened workshop, looking for any rats stupid enough to come into her territory while she slept. She knew they were out there, just beyond her nightly range, crawling in the cracks and shadows of the great house’s sprawling basement, keen to steal whatever they could from the kitchens and storerooms. She had spent most of the day napping in her favorite out-of-the-way places, but it was here, curled up on the old mattress behind the rusty boiler in the protection of the workshop, that she felt most at home. Hammers, wrenches, and gears hung down from the rough-hewn beams, and the familiar smell of machinery oil filled the air. Her first thought as she looked around her and listened out into the reaching darkness was that it felt like a good night for hunting.

  Her pa, who had worked on the construction of Biltmore Estate years before and had lived in the basement without permission ever since, lay sleeping on the cot he’d secretly built behind the supply racks. Embers glowed in the old metal barrel over which he had cooked their dinner of chicken and grits a few hours before. They had huddled around the cook fire for warmth as they ate. As usual, she had eaten the chicken but left the grits.

  “Eat your supper,” her pa had grumbled.

  “Did,” she had answered, setting down her half-empty tin plate.

  “Your whole supper,” he said, pushing the plate toward her, “or you’re never gonna get any bigger than a little shoat.”

  Her pa likened her to a skinny baby pig when he wanted to get a rise out of her, figuring she’d get so furious with him that she’d wolf those nasty grits down her throat despite herself.

  “I’m not gonna eat the grits, Pa,” she said, smiling a little, “no matter how many times you put ’em in front of me.”

  “They ain’t nothin’ but ground-up corn, girl,” he said, poking at the fire with a stick to arrange the other sticks the way he wanted them. “Everybody and his uncle likes corn ’cept you.”

  “You know I can’t stomach anything green or yellow or disgusting like that, Pa, so quit hollering at me.”

  “If I was a-hollerin’, you’d know it,” he said, shoving his poker stick into the fire.

  By and by, they soon forgot about the grits and went on to talk about something else.

  It made Serafina smile to think about her dinner with her father. She couldn’t imagine much else in the world—except maybe sleeping in the warmth of one of the basement’s small sunlit windows—that was finer than a bit of banter with her pa.

  Careful not to wake him, she slinked off her mattress, padded across the workshop’s gritty stone floor, and snuck out into the winding passageway. While still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and stretching out her arms and legs, she couldn’t help but feel a trace of excitement. The tantalizing sensation of starting a brand-new night tingled through her body. She felt her muscles and her senses coming alive, as if she were an owl stirring its wings and flexing its talons before it flies off for its ghostly hunt.

  She moved quietly through the darkness, past the laundry rooms, pantries, and kitchens. The basement had been bustling with servants all day, but the rooms were empty now, and dark, just the way she liked them. She knew that the Vanderbilts and their many guests were sleeping on the second and third floors above her, but here it was quiet. She loved to prowl through the endless corridors and shadowed storage rooms. She knew the touch and feel, the glint and gloom, of every nook and cranny. This was her domain at night, and hers alone.

  She heard a faint slithering just ahead. The night was beginning quickly.

  She stopped. She listened.

  Two doors down, the scrabbling of tiny feet on bare floor.

  She crept forward along the wall.

  When the sound stopped, she stopped as well. When the sound resumed, she crept forward once more. It was a technique she’d taught herself by the age of seven: move when they’re moving, stay still when they’re still.

  Now she could hear the creatures breathing, the scratching of their toenails on the stone, and the dragging of their tails. She felt the familiar trembling in her fingers and the tightness in her legs.

  She slipped through the half-open door into the storeroom and saw them in the darkness: two huge rats covered in greasy brown fur had slithered one by one up through the drainpipe in the floor. The intruders were obviously newcomers, foolishly scrounging for cockroaches when they could’ve been slurping custard off the fresh-baked pastries just down the hall.

  Without making a sound or even disturbing the air, she stalked slowly toward the rats. Her eyes focused on them. Her ears picked up every sound they made. She could even smell their foul sewer stench. All the while, they went about their rotten, ratty business and had no idea she was there.

  She stopped just a few feet behind them, hidden in the blackness of a shadow, poised for the leap. This was the moment she loved, the moment just before she lunged. Her body swayed slightly back and forth, tuning her angle of attack. Then she pounced. In one quick, explosive movement, she grabbed the squealing, writhing rats with her bare hands.

  “Gotcha, ya nasty varmints!” she hissed.

  The smaller rat squirmed in terror, desperate to get away, but the larger one twisted around and bit her hand.

  “There’ll be none of that!” she snarled, clamping the rat’s neck firmly between her finger and thumb.

  The rats wriggled wildly, but she kept a good, hard hold on them and wouldn’t let them go. It had taken her a while to learn that lesson when she was younger, that once you had them, you had to squeeze hard and hold on, no matter what, even if their little claws scratched you and their scaly tails curled around your hand like some sort of nasty gray snake.

  Finally, after several seconds of vicious struggling, the exhausted rats realized they couldn’t escape her. They went still and stared suspiciously at her with their beady black eyes. Their snivelin
g little noses and wickedly long whiskers vibrated with fear. The rat who’d bit her slowly slithered his long, scaly tail around her wrist, wrapping it two times, searching for new advantage to pry himself free.

  “Don’t even try it,” she warned him. Still bleeding from his bite, she was in no mood for his ratty schemes. She’d been bitten before, but she never did like it much.

  Carrying the grisly beasts in her clenched fists, she took them down the passageway. It felt good to get two rats before midnight, and they were particularly ugly characters, the kind that would chew straight through a burlap sack to get at the grain inside, or knock eggs off the shelf so they could lick the mess from the floor.

  She climbed the old stone stairs that led outside, then walked across the moonlit grounds of the estate all the way to the edge of the forest. There she hurled the rats into the leaves. “Now get on outta here, and don’t come back!” she shouted at them. “I won’t be so nice next time!”

  The rats tumbled across the forest floor with the force of her fierce throw, then came to a trembling stop, expecting a killing blow. When it didn’t come, they turned and looked up at her in astonishment.

  “Get goin’ before I change my mind,” she said.

  Hesitating no longer, the rats scurried into the underbrush.

  There had been a time when the rats she caught weren’t so lucky, when she’d leave their bodies next to her pa’s bed to show him her night’s work, but she hadn’t done that in a coon’s age.

  Ever since she was a youngin, she’d studied the men and women who worked in the basement, so she knew that each one had a particular job. It was her father’s responsibility to fix the elevators, dumbwaiters, window gears, steam heating systems, and all of the other mechanical contraptions on which the two-hundred-and-fifty-room mansion depended. He even made sure the pipe organ in the Grand Banquet Hall worked properly for Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s fancy balls. Besides her pa, there were cooks, kitchen maids, coal shovelers, chimney sweeps, laundry women, pastry makers, housemaids, footmen, and countless others.

  When she was ten years old, she had asked, “Do I have a job like everyone else, Pa?”

  “Of course ya do,” he said, but she suspected that it wasn’t true. He just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  “What is it? What’s my job?” she pressed him.

  “It’s actually an extremely important position around here, and there ain’t no one who does it better than you, Sera.”

  “Tell me, Pa. What is it?”

  “I reckon you’re Biltmore Estate’s C.R.C.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked in excitement.

  “You’re the Chief Rat Catcher,” he said.

  However the words were intended, they emblazoned themselves in her mind. She remembered even now, two years later, how 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 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 f
right. 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.