Serafina and the Black Cloak

by Robert Beatty

  Braeden followed her in with the grace of familiarity and took a seat. Gidean sat on the floor, eyeing her with fanged intent.

  Mind your own business, dog, she thought as she stared back at him.

  Mr. Crankshod shut the carriage door and climbed up onto the driver’s bench with the other coachman.

  Oh, great, rat face is driving us, Serafina thought. She had no idea how long a trip this would be or how she could send word back to her pa. He’d ordered her to hide in the basement, not get kidnapped by the young master and his stink-breathed henchman. But at least she’d finally be able to talk to Braeden alone about what she saw the night before.

  The carriage seat looked too clean for her to sit on with her basement clothing, and she was supposed to be cleaning the young master’s boots, so she knelt on the floor of the carriage and wondered how she was going to pretend to clean his boots when she didn’t have any brushes or polish. Spit and polish was one thing, but just spit was another.

  “You don’t really have to clean my boots,” Braeden said softly. “I was just going along with your story.”

  Just as Serafina looked up at him and their eyes were about to meet, the horses pulled and the carriage jounced forward. In a moment as unusual as it was mortifying, she actually lost her balance. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled as she fell against Braeden’s legs and then quickly straightened herself up.

  She glanced at the seat that she suspected she was supposed to be sitting on, but the dog stared at her with his steely eyes. When she moved toward the seat, the dog growled, low and menacing, baring his teeth as if to say, If I can’t sit on the seat, then neither can you.

  “No, Gidean,” Braeden chastised him. She couldn’t decide if the young master had spoken the command because he wanted to protect her or if he just didn’t want to get the inside of his carriage bloody. In any case, Gidean’s ears crumpled and his head lowered under the force of his master’s reprimand.

  Seeing her chance, she slipped onto the seat opposite Braeden and as far away from the dog as possible.

  As Gidean continued staring at her, she felt an overwhelming desire to hiss at him and make him back off, but she didn’t think that would go over too well with the young master, so she held back the urge.

  She had never liked dogs, and dogs had never liked her. Whenever they saw her, they barked. One time, she had to scurry up a tree to get away from a crazed foxhound, and her pa had to use a ladder to retrieve her.

  When the carriage rumbled into a turn, Serafina looked out the window and saw the grand facade of the house. Biltmore Estate rose four stories high with its ornately carved gray stone walls. Gargoyles and ancient warriors adorned its dark copper edges. Chimneys, turrets, and towers formed the spires of its almost Gothic presence. Two giant statues of lions guarded the massive oak doors at the entrance, as if warding off evil spirits. She had marveled at those statues many times on her midnight prowls. She had always loved them. She imagined that those great cats were Biltmore’s protectors, its guardians, and she could think of no more important job.

  In the golden light of the setting sun, the mansion really could be quite startlingly lovely. But as the sun withdrew its brightness behind the surrounding mountains, it cast ominous shadows across the estate, which reminded her of griffins, chimeras, and other twisted creatures of the night that were half one thing and half another. The thought of it gave her a shudder. In one moment, the estate was the most beautiful home you had ever seen, but in the next, it was a dark and foreboding haunted castle.

  “Lie down and be good,” Braeden said.

  She looked at him in surprise and then realized that he was talking to the dog, not to her.

  Gidean complied with his master’s request and lay down at his feet. The dog seemed a little more relaxed now, but when he looked at Serafina, his expression seemed to say, Just because I’m lying down, don’t think for a second that if you do something to my master I can’t still kill you.…

  She smiled to herself. She couldn’t help it—she was beginning to like this dog. She could understand him, his fierceness and his loyalty. She admired that.

  As she tried to get used to the rumbling motion of the moving carriage, she noticed that Braeden was studying her.

  “I’ve been looking for you…” he said.

  She stole a quick glance at him and then looked away. When she looked into his eyes, it felt like he could tell what she was thinking. It was unnerving.

  She tried to say something, but when she opened her mouth, she could barely breathe. Of course, she’d snuck around enough over the years to overhear people of all walks of life speaking to one another, so theoretically she knew how it was done. So many guests and servants had passed through Biltmore over the years that she could take on a rich lady’s air or a mountain woman’s twang or even a New York accent, but for some reason, she struggled mightily to find the right words—any words—to say to the young master.

  “I—I’m sorry about all this,” she said finally. The annoying constriction in her chest seemed to strangle her words as she spoke them. She wasn’t sure if she sounded anything like a halfway normal person or not. “I mean, I’m sorry about being dumped into your carriage like luggage that wouldn’t fit on the roof, and I don’t know why your dog doesn’t like me.”

  Braeden looked at Gidean and then back at her. “He normally likes people, especially girls. It’s strange.”

  “There are plenty of strange things happening today,” she said, her chest loosening up a bit as she began to realize that Braeden was going to actually talk to her.

  “You think so, too?” he said, leaning toward her.

  He wasn’t anything like what she imagined the young master of the Vanderbilt mansion would be, especially as good-looking and well educated as he was. She had expected him to be snobbish, bossy, and aloof, but he was none of these things.

  “I don’t think Clara Brahms is hiding,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “Do you?”

  “No,” she said, raising her eyes and looking at him. “I definitely don’t.” She wanted to pour it all out and tell him everything she knew. That had been her plan all along. But her pa’s words kept going through her mind: They ain’t our kind of folk, Sera.

  Whatever he was, Braeden seemed to be a good person. As he was talking to her, he didn’t judge her or discount her. If anything, he actually seemed to like her. Or maybe he was just fascinated by her in the same way he would be by a weird species of insect he’d never seen before, but either way, he kept talking.

  “She’s not the first one, you know,” he whispered.

  “What do you mean?” she said, drawing closer to him.

  “Two weeks ago, a fifteen-year-old girl named Anastasia Rostonova went out for a walk in the evening in the Rambles, and she didn’t come back.”

  “Really?” she asked, hanging on his every word. She had thought she had something to tell him, but it turned out that he had just as much to tell her. A boy who whispered about kidnappings and skulduggery was the kind of boy she could learn to like. She knew the Rambles well, but she also knew that the shrubbery maze of crisscrossing paths caused many people great confusion.

  “Everyone said Anastasia must have wandered into the forest and gotten lost,” he continued, “or that she ran away from home. But I know they’re wrong.”

  “How do you know?” she asked, keen to hear the details.

  “The next morning, I found her little white dog wandering around the paths of the Rambles. The poor dog was frantic, desperately searching for her.” Braeden looked at Gidean. “I didn’t know Anastasia well—she’d only been visiting with her father for a couple of days when she disappeared—but I don’t think she would have run away and left her dog behind.”

  Serafina thought that sounded about right. Braeden seemed as loyal to Gidean as Gidean was to him. They were friends, and she liked that. Then she thought about that poor girl and what might have happened to her.

  “Anastasia R
ostonova…” She repeated the funny-sounding name.

  “She’s the daughter of Mr. Rostonov, the Russian ambassador,” Braeden explained. “She told me that Russian girls always put an a on the end of their last name.”

  “What did she look like?” she asked, wanting to make sure she hadn’t gotten her kidnapped rich girls mixed up.

  “She’s tall and pretty, and she has long, curly black hair, and she wears elaborate red dresses that look really hard to walk in.”

  “Do you think she vanished like Clara Brahms?” Serafina asked.

  Before he could answer, something caught her eye through the carriage windows. There were trees on either side of the carriage. They were traveling down a narrow dirt road that wound through a thick and darkened forest, the very forest that her pa had warned her to never enter. And the very forest where she had been born. She couldn’t help but feel a pang of trepidation. “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “My aunt and uncle are worried about me, so they’re sending me to the Vances’ in Asheville for the night to keep me out of harm’s way. They ordered Crankshod to guard me.”

  “That wasn’t very smart,” she said before she could help herself. It wasn’t a very polite thing to say, but for some reason, she was having a dickens of a time not telling Braeden the truth.

  “I’ve always detested that man,” Braeden agreed, “but my uncle depends on him.”

  As she looked out the window at the forest, she could no longer see the horizon or the sun. All she could see was the thick density of the forest’s huge old trees, black and decrepit, which grew so closely together that she could barely tell one from the other. It seemed a dark and foreboding place for anyone to even visit, let alone live, but there was something that excited her about it, too.

  But then she felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. Somewhere, miles behind them, was Biltmore. Her pa would be wondering why she wasn’t showing up for dinner. No chicken or grits tonight, Pa. I’m sorry, she thought. Try not to worry about me. A day ago, she had been leading a perfectly normal life catching rats in the basement, and now everything had turned so bizarre.

  Pulling her gaze away from the forest, she finally turned to Braeden, swallowed hard, and began to say what she’d come for. “There is something I need to tell—”

  “How come I’ve never seen you before?” he interrupted.

  “What?” she asked, taken aback.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Yeah, good question,” she said before she could stop herself, imagining the bloody pile of dead creatures her pa had plucked her from.

  “I’m serious,” he said, staring at her. “Why haven’t I seen you before?”

  “Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right places,” she shot back at him, feeling cornered.

  But when she saw his eyes, she realized that he wasn’t going to give up. Her temples began to pound, and she couldn’t think straight. Why was he asking all these infernal questions?

  “Well, where do you come from?” she asked, trying to throw him off the trail.

  “You know I live at Biltmore,” he said gently. “I’m asking about you.”

  “I-I…” she stammered, staring at her lap. “Maybe you met me before and just forgot,” she said.

  “I would have remembered you,” he said quietly.

  “Well, maybe I’m just visiting for the weekend,” she said weakly, looking at the floor.

  He wasn’t buying any of it. “Please tell me where you live, Serafina,” he said firmly.

  It surprised her when he said her name like that. It had tremendous power over her, like she had no choice but to look up at him and meet his gaze, which turned out to be a serious mistake. He was looking at her so intently that it felt as if he were casting a spell of truth on her.

  “I live in your basement,” she said, and was immediately shocked that she’d actually uttered it out loud. He had powers over her that she did not understand.

  He stared at her as her words hung in the air. She could see the confusion in his face and sense the questions forming in his mind.

  She had no idea why she said it. It had just come flying out of her mouth.

  But she’d done it. She’d said it out loud, straight to his face. Please forgive me, Pa. She’d wrecked everything. She’d ruined their lives. Now her pa would be fired. They’d be kicked out of Biltmore. They’d be forced to wander the streets of Asheville, begging for scraps of food. No one would hire a man who’d lied to his employer, holed up in his basement, and stolen food from him for his eight-toed daughter. No one.

  She looked at Braeden. “Please don’t tell anyone…” she said quietly, but she knew there were no claws in that paw, nothing at all to protect her. If he wanted to, he could tell anyone—Mr. Crankshod, Mr. Boseman, even Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt—and then the life she and her pa had made together at Biltmore would be over. They might even go to prison for stealing food all those years.

  Just as Braeden was about to speak, the horses screamed and the carriage slammed to a halt. She was hurled across the open space and crashed into him. Gidean leapt to his feet and began to bark wildly.

  “Something has happened,” Braeden said fiercely as he quickly untangled himself from her and opened the carriage door.

  It was pitch-dark outside.

  She tried to listen for what was out there, but her heart pounded so loudly that she couldn’t hear a thing. She tried to calm herself down and really listen, but the forest was too quiet. There were no owls, no frogs, no insects, no birds—none of the normal night sounds she was used to hearing. Just silence. It was like every living creature in the forest was hiding for its dear life. Or already dead.

  “Mr. Crankshod?” Braeden asked uncertainly into the darkness.

  No answer came.

  The hairs on the back of Serafina’s neck stood on end.

  Braeden stepped partway out of the carriage and looked up at the driver’s bench at the front. “There’s no one there!” he said in astonishment. “They’re both gone!”

  The four horses were still in the harnesses, but the carriage had stopped dead in the road. Right in the middle of the forest.

  Serafina climbed slowly out of the carriage and stood at Braeden’s side. The forest surrounded them, black and impenetrable, the craggy-barked trees packed densely together. Her legs jittered beneath her, filled with nervous impulse. She tried to steady her breathing. Her whole body wanted to move, but she forced herself to stay with Braeden and Gidean.

  She watched and listened to the unnaturally quiet forest, extending her senses out into the void. She couldn’t hear a single toad or whip-poor-will. But it felt like there was something out there, something big but extremely quiet. She didn’t even know how that was possible.

  Gidean stood beside her on full alert, staring into the trees. Whatever it was, he sensed it, too.

  Braeden looked warily into the darkness that surrounded them and walked forward a few feet in the direction the carriage was facing.

  “I wish I had a lantern,” he said. “I can’t see anything at all.”

  The horses fidgeted in their harnesses, their hooves shifting uneasily in the gravel.

  “When they’re scared, they move their feet,” Braeden said sympathetically. “They have no claws, no sharp teeth, no weapons. Their speed is their main defense.”

  She marveled at how Braeden didn’t just see the horses but understood how they thought.

  When a breeze passed through the woods and rattled the branches of the trees, the horses spooked. All four of them pulled and tugged against their harnesses. It was like they were being attacked by some invisible predator. Squealing, the front two horses reared up on their hind legs and struck the air with their hooves.

  As Serafina shrank back from the danger in frightened dismay, Braeden rushed forward and put himself between her and the horses. Standing in front of them, he raised his open hands to calm them. They towered above him, their eyes white with fea
r, their heads thrashing and their hooves flying. She was sure they were going to kick him in the head, or slam him with a shoulder, or trample him to death, but he stood with his hands raised, speaking to them in soft, gentle tones. “It’s all right. We’re all here,” he said to them. “We’re all together.”

  To her astonishment, the horses were calmed by his presence and his words. He touched their shoulders with his outstretched hands and seemed to bring the rearing horses back to the ground. Then he held the head of the lead horse in his hands and pressed his forehead to the horse’s forehead so that they were looking at each other eye to eye, and he spoke to the horse in quiet, reassuring tones. “We’re in this together, my friend. We’re going to be all right…There’s no need to run, no need to fight…”

  The lead horse breathed heavily through its nose as it listened to Braeden’s words, then settled and became still. The other horses quieted as well, reassured by the young master.

  “H-how did you…?” she stammered.

  “These horses and I have been friends for a long time,” he replied, but said nothing more.

  Still astounded by what he’d done, she looked around at their surroundings. “What do you think frightened them?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen them so scared.”

  Braeden turned and looked down the road ahead of them. He squinted into the darkness and then he pointed. “What is that up there?” he asked. “I can’t make it out. Does the road turn?”

  She looked in the direction he pointed. It wasn’t a turn in the road. A huge tree with thick, gnarly branches and a scattering of bloodred leaves lay across the road, completely blocking their path.

  Suddenly, Mr. Crankshod emerged out of the darkness, trudging his way back to the carriage. “We’re gonna need the ax,” he grumbled angrily.