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
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Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-4847-1511-6

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Contents

1. Title Page
   
2. Copyright
   
3. Dedication
   
4. Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina, 1899
   
5. 1
   
6. 2
   
7. 3
   
8. 4
   
9. 5
   
10. 6
    
11. 7
    
12. 8
    
13. 9
    
14. 10
    
15. 11
    
16. 12
    
17. 13
    
18. 14
    
19. 15
    
20. 16
    
21. 17
    
22. 18
    
23. 19
    
24. 20
    
25. 21
    
26. 22
    
27. 23
    
28. 24
    
29. 25
    
30. 26
    
31. 27
    
32. 28
    
33. 29
    
34. 30
    
35. 31
    
36. Acknowledgments
    
37. 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

S
erafina 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 sniveling 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.