Serafina and the Black Cloak (2 page)

“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 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 just what would happen if they did. What if the boy glimpsed her? What would she
do? What if his dog chased her? Could she get up a tree in time? Sometimes she liked to imagine what she would say if she met Mrs. Vanderbilt face-to-face.
Hello, Mrs. V. I catch your rats for
you. Would you like them killed or just chucked out?
Sometimes she dreamed of wearing fancy dresses and ribbons in her hair and shiny shoes on her feet. And sometimes, just sometimes, she
longed not just to listen secretly to the people around her, but to talk to them. Not just to see them, but to be
seen
.

As she walked through the moonlight across the open grass and back to the main house, she wondered what would happen if one of the guests, or perhaps the young master in his bedroom on the
second floor, happened to wake and look out the window and see a mysterious girl walking alone in the night.

Her pa never spoke of it, but she knew she wasn’t exactly normal looking. She had a skinny little body, nothing but muscle, bone, and sinew.

She didn’t own a dress, so she wore one of her pa’s old work shirts, which she cinched around her narrow waist with a length of fibrous twine she’d scavenged from the workshop.
He didn’t buy her any clothes because he didn’t want people in town to ask questions and start meddling; meddling was something he could never brook.

Her long hair wasn’t a single color like normal people had, but varying shades of gold and light brown. Her face had a peculiar angularity in the cheeks. And she had large, steady amber
eyes. She could see at night as well as she could during the day. Even her soundless hunting skills weren’t exactly normal. Every person she’d ever encountered, especially her pa, made
so much noise when they walked that it was like they were one of the big Belgian draft horses that pulled the farm equipment in Mr. Vanderbilt’s fields.

And it all made her wonder, looking up at the windows of the great house. What did the people sleeping in those rooms dream of, with their one-colored hair, and their long, pointy noses, and
their big bodies lying in their soft beds all through the glorious darkness of the night? What did they long for? What made them laugh or jump? What did they feel inside? When they had dinner at
night, did the children eat the grits or just the chicken?

As she glided down the stairs and back into the basement, she heard something in a distant corridor. She stopped and listened, but she couldn’t quite make it out. It wasn’t a rat.
That much was certain. Something much larger. But what was it?

Curious, she moved toward the sound.

She went past her pa’s workshop, the kitchens, and the other rooms she knew well, and into the deeper areas where she hunted less often. She heard doors closing, then the fall of footsteps
and muffled noises. Her heart began to thump lightly in her chest. Someone was walking through the corridors of the basement.
Her
basement.

She moved closer.

It wasn’t the servant who collected the garbage each night, or one of the footmen fetching a late-night snack for a guest—she knew the sound of their footsteps well. Sometimes the
butler’s assistant, who was eleven, would stop in the corridor and gobble down a few of the cookies from the silver tray that the butler had sent him to retrieve. She’d stand just
around the corner from him in the darkness and pretend that they were friends just talking and enjoying each other’s company for a while. Then the boy would wipe the powdered sugar off his
lips, and off he’d go, hurrying up the stairs to catch up on the time he’d lost. But this wasn’t him.

Whoever it was, he wore what sounded like hard-soled shoes—
expensive
shoes. But a gentleman proper had no business coming down into this area of the house. Why was he wandering
through the dark passages in the middle of the night?

Increasingly curious, she followed the stranger, careful to avoid being seen. Whenever she snuck up close enough to almost see him, all she could make out was the shadow of a tall black shape
carrying a dimly lit lantern. And there was another shadow there, too, someone or something with him, but she didn’t dare creep close enough to see who or what it was.

It was a vast basement with many different rooms, corridors, and levels, which had been built into the slope of the earth beneath the house. Some areas, like the kitchens and the laundry, had
smooth plaster walls and windows. The rooms there were plainly finished, but clean and dry, and well-suited to the daily work of the servants. The more distant reaches of the understructure delved
deep into the damp and earthen burrows of the house’s massive foundation. Here the dark, hardened mortar oozed out from between the roughly hewn stone blocks that formed the walls and
ceiling, and she seldom went there because it was cold, dirty, and dank.

Suddenly, the footsteps changed direction. They came toward her. Five screeching rats came running down the corridor ahead of the footfalls, more terrified than any rodents she had ever seen.
Spiders crawled out of the cracks in the walls. Cockroaches and centipedes erupted from the earthen floor. Astounded by what she was seeing, she caught her breath and pressed herself to the wall,
frozen in fear like a little rabbit kit trembling beneath the shadow of a passing hawk.

As the man walked toward her, she heard another sound, too. It was a shuffling agitation like a small person—slippered feet, perhaps a child—but there was something wrong. The
child’s feet were scraping on the stone, sometimes sliding…the child was crippled…no…the child was being
dragged
.