Serafina and the Black Cloak (8 page)

She slinked down the stairs, down and down again, into the damp darkness of the subbasement until she came to the slanted, brown-dripping corridor.

She couldn’t stop her breathing from getting heavier, but she kept going, telling herself that she’d be safe.

She crept through the darkness until she came to the spot where she’d seen the Man in the Black Cloak. There was no sign of Clara Brahms, but there were red drips on the wall. On the floor
she found a tiny shard of glass.
From the broken lantern,
she thought.

She searched the area but found nothing else.

On her way back, she followed the same series of corridors she had used to escape the demon or whatever it was. She studied the areas where she had battled for her life. She spotted something
lying at the base of the wall that, at first glance, looked like a dead, rotting rat. It had the size and color of one of the nasty vermin, but as she took a step closer, her nose wrinkled. It gave
off a putrid, foul smell, but it wasn’t a rat. She clenched her teeth and got down onto her hands and knees and examined it. It was a glove lying crumpled on the floor. Images of the Black
Cloak swirling around her rose up in her mind, the cloak cutting her off from all she knew and loved.

It’s just a glove, you silly fool,
she thought, smiling at her scaredy-cat thoughts, but when she picked it up, her mouth curled in disgust. Inside the glove there were bloody
patches of skin.

It was so disgusting, far worse than any rat carcass she’d ever found, but she forced herself to examine it more closely. The glove was made out of a fine, thin, black satin material. The
flakes and patches of skin inside appeared as if they had sloughed off the hand that had last worn the glove. The skin had black spots and gray hairs. It was as if the owner of the glove
hadn’t just been old, but aging rapidly, almost disintegrating. Her muscles twitched as she remembered fighting for her life. She had bitten and clawed in a wild frenzy. The glove must have
fallen from his belt or pocket, for she remembered that his hands had been bare and bloody when she fought him.

Men’s gloves were as common as top hats and canes, so it wasn’t a very good clue. It didn’t provide her evidence to show to the young master. But it did stiffen the idea that
whoever or whatever the Man in the Black Cloak was, there was something wrong with him.

Anxious to get out of the damp and more determined than ever to find the young master, she scampered her way up to the main level of the basement.

Many of the rooms on this level had windows at the tops of the walls. Outside, she could see servants and guests searching the gardens, the Rambles maze, and the many footpaths. She
couldn’t help but hope to see Braeden Vanderbilt among them.

She wondered if she could think of Braeden as her friend now, or if she was fooling herself. The God’s honest truth was that she didn’t even know what a friend was, other than what
she’d read in books. If you meet someone face-to-face and they don’t hiss at you and bite you, does that mean you’re friends? But when she thought about it a little more, she
remembered that she did in fact nearly hiss at the young master when they first met, so that wasn’t ideal. Maybe they weren’t friends at all. Maybe he thought she was nothing but a
lowly dirt-scraper from the basement and she didn’t warrant a second thought. She probably should have told him right off that she was the C.R.C. That would have been a lot more impressive.
As it was, she just wasn’t sure what sort of impression she’d made, except that she was dirty, rude, unkempt, and had bad hair.

She darted up the stairs to the first floor. She took advantage of the chaos of the search to scurry unseen from one hiding spot to another. She moved silently, padding swiftly on soft feet. The
adults spoke so loudly and made such a galumphing noise when they stomped all over the place that they were easy to avoid.

She dashed over to the Winter Garden, where she hid beneath the fronds of the tropical plants.

As Mrs. Vanderbilt and two servants hurried down the corridor, Serafina scooted into the Billiard Room and made a narrow escape. She thought that even her rodent enemies would have been
impressed by her quickness of foot on that particular maneuver.

Walled in rich oak paneling and appointed with soft leather chairs, the Billiard Room smelled of cigar smoke. Deep-hued Oriental carpets covered the floor. Black wrought-iron lamp fixtures hung
down from the ceiling over the game tables. Animal heads and hunting trophies lined the walls. She liked those. The trophies on the walls reminded her of the rats she’d killed and laid at her
pa’s feet. So she and the Vanderbilts had that much in common. On the other hand, she had stopped doing that when she realized that it was the catching she liked more than the killing.

Just as she was about to leave the room, a footman came in with one of the maids. Serafina quickly dove beneath the billiard table.

“Maybe she’s been giving us the slip at every turn, Miss Whitney,” the footman said, leaning down to look under the billiard table just as Serafina darted behind the sofa.

“She could be just about anywhere, Mr. Pratt,” Miss Whitney agreed, looking behind the sofa just as Serafina hid in the green velvet curtains that adorned the windows.

“Do you know if anyone has checked the pipe organ?” Mr. Pratt asked. “There’s a secret room back there.”

“The girl is a pianist, so she might be curious about the organ,” Miss Whitney agreed.

Taking a quick breath and using the curtain for cover, Serafina climbed up the window stile lickety-split, then wedged herself into the uppermost corner of the window. She had just enough time
to see that Mr. Pratt was wearing white gloves, a black tie, and a black-and-white footman’s livery, but she took special notice of his black patent-leather dress shoes.

“What do you mean, she’s a pianist?” Mr. Pratt asked.

“Tilly, on the third floor, told me the girl’s some sort of musical prodigy, gives piano concerts all over the country,” Miss Whitney said, as she ran her hands through the
curtains where Serafina had just been hiding.

Serafina held her breath and stayed very still. Miss Whitney was so close to her now that she could smell her sweet lavender-and-rose perfume. All Miss Whitney had to do was pull back the
curtain and look up, and she’d see Serafina clinging there with a Cheshire smile. Despite her fear of being seen, Serafina couldn’t resist noticing the details of the maid’s
outfit. She loved the pretty pink uniform with its white collar and cuffs, which the maids wore in the morning before changing into their more formal black-and-white uniforms in the afternoon.

“Come on. There’s no one in here,” Mr. Pratt said. “We’ll check the pipe organ.”

Serafina breathed a sigh of relief as Miss Whitney walked to the other side of the room.

Mr. Pratt pushed the oak-paneled wall just to the right of the fireplace.

“Oh my!” Miss Whitney said in surprise, laughing nervously as a concealed door opened up. “I’ve cleaned this room countless times, and I never knew that was there.
You’re always so clever, Mr. Pratt.”

Serafina rolled her eyes at Miss Whitney’s silliness. The maid was obviously besotted with this know-it-all footman. Serafina liked Miss Whitney, but she could sure use some help learning
how to sniff out a rat. And that was exactly what Serafina thought about shiny-shoes Mr. Pratt.

Mr. Pratt laughed, clearly pleased with Miss Whitney’s reaction to his little trick.

“How do you know about all these secret things?” Miss Whitney asked him. “Do you skulk through the rooms at night when everyone else is sleeping?”

“Oh, I’m full of surprises, Miss Whitney, and not just about a little girl in a yellow dress, you wait and see,” he said. “Come on…”

Yellow dress?
How did he know what Clara was wearing when she disappeared? There was something about this footman that Serafina didn’t like. He was too slick, too flirty, too tricky
in his hoity-toity black livery, and she didn’t trust him any more than she trusted a rat in the pastry kitchen.

I wouldn’t go in there if I were you!
She wanted to shout to Miss Whitney as they passed through the concealed door, but instead she listened to the rat’s footsteps. They were
similar to the footsteps she’d heard in the basement the night before, but he and Miss Whitney disappeared into the wall too quickly for her to be sure one way or the other.

As soon as they were gone, she climbed down and checked the area to the right of the fireplace to make sure she’d be able to find the concealed door if she ever needed it. A concealed door
could be a very useful thing to a girl of her particular occupation. Measuring three oak panels tall and two oak panels wide, the door was disguised to look exactly like the wall. There was even a
framed picture hanging there, a weirdly realistic tintype of a white-haired old man that she guessed was probably Mr. Vanderbilt’s long-dead grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

It pained her to think that not only did she not have a grandpa to tell her stories about the old times, she barely even had a pa anymore. He was just someone who found her in a bloody heap and
decided to steal goat’s milk to keep her alive in his toolbox. He could be anybody. And she was still mightily perturbed at him for not coming straight with her sooner.

Below the hunting trophies that loomed above, the wall was covered with portraits of Vanderbilts. Mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, brothers and sisters and cousins. She found herself
instinctively searching the faces to see if any of them resembled her. Was Clara Brahms alive someplace, wondering if her mother had forgotten her, just as Serafina often wondered about her own?
But the difference was that Mrs. Brahms hadn’t forgotten her daughter, would never leave her behind. Clara Brahms’s mother was still looking for her.

Serafina stepped closer to the wall of pictures. The last picture was another depiction of old Cornelius, the patriarch of the grand Vanderbilt family, walking proudly beside one of his iron
steam trains, the blur of his motion giving him a ghostlike quality. It put shivers down her spine just looking at it. But the picture had gone a bit catawampus when Mr. Pratt and Miss Whitney went
through, so she straightened it out. When she touched the door, it glided open on smooth, well-oiled hinges. She took a deep breath, then slipped through.

To her surprise, the secret door led to the Smoking Room. From there, she found a similar passage into the Gun Room, with its racks of rifles and shotguns protected by panes of
glass. Seeing her reflection in the glass, she spit on the back of her hand and wiped her face until she got a few of the larger smudges off her cheeks and chin. Then she smoothed her long
brown-streaked hair back behind her ears in a few quick movements. She stood there and just stared at herself, wondering.

If her momma saw her, would she recognize her? Would she hug her and kiss her or would she look the other way and just keep walking? When strangers saw her, what did they think? What did they
see, a girl or a creature?

As a group of estate guests walked past the room, she heard them talking in hushed voices that perked up her ears.

“I’m telling you it’s true!” a young man whispered.

“I heard about it, too,” whispered another. “My grandmama told me that there’s an old cemetery out there with hundreds of gravestones, but the bodies are
missing!”

“I heard there’s an old village,” said a third voice. “It’s all overgrown and taken back by the forest, like everyone who lived there abandoned their
houses.”

Serafina had heard the tall tales passed around among the kitchen folk at night, but she’d never been too sure whether she was supposed to believe them or not.

Every place she went in the house that day, she overheard conversations—gentlemen discussing whether detectives should be called in to investigate the missing child; servants trading
stories about suspicious guests; and parents arguing about the best way to protect their sons and daughters from getting lost in the giant house without being rude to the Vanderbilts. And now they
were talking about the old cemetery in the woods.

She kept thinking about the Man in the Black Cloak. If he was one of these people, he could be lurking in any corridor or room. How do you tell a friend from an enemy just by looking at him?

It seemed like the farther she went, the more questions she had. The only thing certain so far was that the search continued and they still hadn’t found Clara Brahms. Either alive or
dead.

Then she had an idea. If the Man in the Black Cloak was some sort of wraith that drifted out of the forest at night, or if he conjured himself out of the ether in the basement, then she probably
wouldn’t find very much evidence of him in the upper floors of the house. But if the Man in the Black Cloak was at least partially mortal and resided at Biltmore, then he’d have to
stash his cloak someplace when he wasn’t wearing it. If she could find the cloak, then maybe she could find the man.

The closets and storerooms throughout the house were some of her favorite hiding spots, so she knew them well. When ladies and gentlemen came to Biltmore, they usually exited from their
carriages at the front door. But in bad weather, they used the covered porte cochere at the north end of the house, near the stables. Always just out of sight, darting and dodging, creeping and
crawling, she made her way there.

The coatroom was dark and cramped, which suited her just fine. She loved closets. As she pushed her way through the thick forest of coats, cloaks, stoles, and capes, she searched the hangers one
by one, looking for a long black satin cloak. When she reached the back wall of the coatroom without finding it, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment.

As she crept out of the coatroom, she realized that she’d have to go to Braeden without any proof, but the truth was that she hadn’t been able to find
him
, either.

You’ve got to think, girl,
she heard her pa telling her in the tone he used when she couldn’t reckon one of her lessons.
Use what you know, and think it through.