Serafina and the Black Cloak. Robert Beatty

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      ‘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 young’un, 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 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 shovellers, 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 had 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 fitted 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 whom 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.

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