Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series)

by Robert Beatty

  She remembered the disturbing words he’d screamed to the owl: ‘We shall burn that place down!’

  ‘Let’s look into the records of Biltmore House,’ she said.

  ‘Not my uncle’s travels?’

  ‘No, let’s focus on Biltmore,’ she said, more confident now.

  ‘Those are over here,’ he said, leading her to a different set of boxes.

  As they dug through the papers, it was hard to imagine finding any answers there, but when Braeden opened a box of scratchy, old photographs, she leaned in closer.

  The first photograph she examined showed a vast stretch of clear-cut land with nothing but stumps and weeds, a team of twenty or thirty mules, a couple of wagons piled with firewood, and a score of scroungers with axes. It was hard to imagine, but judging by the view of the mountains in the background it appeared to be the hilltop on which Biltmore was constructed. The clearing was so open and bare and treeless. There were no gardens, no woods, just scarred and empty land. This was how it had looked when Mr Vanderbilt bought the land years before.

  The next photograph showed hundreds of stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters and other craftsmen building the lower floors of Biltmore House. There were men and women, white folk and black folk, Americans and foreigners, Northerners and Southerners, and many mountain folk. Her heart warmed when she spotted her pa in one of the photographs, working on a geared crane system among many other men. She smiled, for in her mind she’d always imagined her pa working alone, building Biltmore almost by himself, for that was how she’d always seen him working. She realised how foolish she had been. He had been but one of thousands of men who had worked for six years. It was amazing to see the scaffolded walls of Biltmore rising from nothingness in photograph after photograph.

  A while later, as she searched through the documents of Biltmore, trying to find the clues they needed, Serafina looked over at Braeden. Exhausted, he had fallen asleep in one of the cushioned chairs. Serafina let him sleep, but she kept looking.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Braeden announced when he awoke. They quickly retrieved some food from the kitchen. But as soon as they’d eaten and washed up they went back to work.

  Later that afternoon, as Braeden was digging through yet another box, he handed her a photograph. ‘Look at this one.’

  Something about it caught Serafina’s eye. Like the other photographs, this one was filled with men and wooden scaffolding, and the half-built Biltmore rising in the background. She wasn’t even sure what the photographer had been trying to take a picture of, other than the construction site itself. Some of the men in the picture were working, some talking, some looking at the camera, others not. When she studied the photograph more closely, one of the men drew her attention. The image was so small it was difficult to tell, but he had a heavily wrinkled face and a long grey moustache and beard. He was not wearing a long coat or carrying a walking stick, but he was gazing into the camera and his eyes looked like dots of silver. It was their enemy – the man she’d seen in the forest. This was him. She was sure of it. That meant he wasn’t a forest haint or nightmarish spectre, but a real person. At least, he had been years before.

  ‘Braeden, look at this,’ Serafina said, showing him the photograph. ‘We need to know who this man is.’

  ‘Then we need to talk to Mr Olmsted,’ Braeden said.

  As Braeden led Mr Olmsted into the library, Serafina watched the balding, grey-bearded old man carefully.

  ‘How can I help the two of you?’ he asked as he made his way into the room, using his wooden cane for balance. ‘Sounds like it was a bad business all round last night, especially for you two.’

  A little startled that Mr Olmsted was so aware of what was going on, Braeden looked over at Serafina, who was standing by the giant globe.

  Serafina shook her head slowly to Braeden. Don’t talk about it. Just get on with our question.

  ‘Sir,’ Braeden said, ‘since you were in charge of many of the work crews during Biltmore’s construction, we were wondering if you could help us with some photographs we found.’

  ‘I can certainly try, Master Braeden,’ he said as he settled onto the sofa in front of the fireplace. ‘This looks like a nice, warm spot.’

  ‘So here is the photograph that we –’

  ‘Perhaps we should have a hot cup of tea before we get started,’ Mr Olmsted said, seeming not to hear that Braeden had already started talking.

  ‘Uh,’ Braeden hesitated, glancing again at Serafina. ‘Certainly, of course,’ he said, and he went over to the wall and pressed the button for the butler’s pantry.

  ‘While we’re waiting for the tea, perhaps we can look at this photograph,’ Serafina said, taking the photo from Braeden and walking over to Mr Olmsted.

  ‘We certainly can, Serafina,’ Mr Olmsted said. It startled her when Mr Olmsted used her name. She hadn’t even realised that he’d known she existed. But then he patted the cushion next to him and invited her to sit beside him. Surprised, she sat on the sofa with him and put the photograph in his hands.

  ‘Oh, this is an old one . . .’ Mr Olmsted said, studying the photograph with interest. His hands trembled as he held it.

  ‘Do you recognise this man here?’ Serafina asked, pointing.

  ‘You rang, sir?’ the footman said as he came into the library in his black-and-white livery.

  ‘Mr Olmsted would like a cup of tea, please,’ Braeden said.

  ‘Right away, sir,’ the footman said, and exited.

  Serafina watched as Mr Olmsted studied the face in the photograph. His expression started out mildly curious, as if he were remembering the fond days of old when he was designing the gardens, sculpting the land and supervising the crews as they planted thousands upon thousands of trees, bushes and flowers. But then his expression shifted. He narrowed his eyes and brought the photograph up close to his face.

  ‘Maybe this will help, sir,’ Braeden said, handing him a magnifying glass he’d pulled from a nearby table.

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you, Master Braeden,’ Mr Olmsted said, and examined the photograph. ‘Yes, I remember this fellow,’ he said finally.

  ‘Who was he?’ Serafina asked.

  For several seconds, Mr Olmsted seemed lost in thought, as if he were trying to figure out how to answer her question. ‘Well, I will tell you a story about a piece of land not too far from here,’ he said finally. ‘Years ago, George Vanderbilt was travelling the country with his mother. He was still a young man, just twenty-six years old. He went out riding his horse one day in the mountains, and he drew rein at the top of a hill. He thought the prospect of the distant scenery very fine. It occurred to him that one day he would like to build a house in that location. He bid his lawyer to see if it was possible to purchase that particular parcel of land. Finding the price to be cheap and the owner anxious to sell, he instructed his lawyer to buy that land and all around it. After securing many thousands of acres, George finally invited me to the location and took me out to that spot on the hill. He said to me, “Now, I have brought you here to examine this land and tell me if I have been doing anything very foolish.”’

  Mr Olmsted smiled as he remembered his friend’s words.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Braeden asked. ‘Was it foolish?’

  ‘Well, I told him the hard truth of it. The site had a good distant outlook, but the land itself had been abused by scavengers and subsistence farming for many years, the soil was depleted, and the woods were miserable, the very hillsides eroding for lack of trees and undergrowth. The squatters who occupied the area didn’t own the land, but they had cut down the trees for their cabins and fuel, and most especially to sell the wood in the city. I watched as these squatters drew jags of hickory cordwood to the city in their carts, selling the wood to the highest bidder. You see, back then, wood was almost a form of currency, and these men were stealing it right out of the forest until there was no forest left, and then they’d go on to the next mountain. They had chopped and burned most of
the forest in the area.’

  ‘Burned?’ Braeden asked in dismay.

  Mr Olmsted nodded. ‘After cutting down all the trees, they made grazing fields for their cattle and hogs. The native cherry, tulip, black walnut, locust and birch that were so vital to these mountains had all been destroyed. Corn, grain and tobacco had been grown year after year until the soil was worn out. This was not unusual for the cotton states after the war. Much of the land had been ravaged and lay in a most desperate state.’

  ‘So my uncle had made a terrible mistake just like he feared,’ Braeden said in astonishment. ‘Did he abandon that property and come and find the Biltmore land with all its beautiful trees?’

  Mr Olmsted smiled a slight but devilish grin beneath his moustache, as if Braeden’s words had pleased him. ‘Not exactly. I told your uncle that the hilltop on which he hoped to build a house did indeed have a lovely view, and the distant acres had potential. I explained that with extensive planting I thought we could rebuild the natural environment that had been lost. It would take time and money, thousands upon thousands of plantings, and years to grow. It had never been done on this scale before, but if we could do it then it would set an example for reforestation throughout the South and, indeed, throughout all of America. We would show the way to conserve and build our forests, rather than just cut them down.’

  ‘Wait,’ Braeden said. ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying that was Biltmore?’

  Mr Olmsted smiled. ‘You are currently standing in the exact spot on which your uncle sat on his horse, looked across the mountain view and decided he wanted to build a house.’

  ‘But all the beautiful trees and the gardens . . .’ Braeden said.

  ‘We planted them,’ Mr Olmsted said simply.

  Serafina sat mesmerised, listening to Mr Olmsted. Unlike Braeden, who was a relative newcomer to the estate, she had grown up here from the very beginning with her pa, so she knew the story, but she still enjoyed hearing it. It amazed her the way Mr Olmsted thought about things on such a vast scale, across the mountains and the whole country, and over decades of time. It seemed like she spent most of her time trying to survive the next few seconds. She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to envision the landscape decades in advance.

  But her thoughts soon turned to the dark business that had brought them to this moment.

  ‘But who is the man in the photograph, Mr Olmsted?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Mr Olmsted said, turning more serious. ‘That’s where our story continues. That same year, as we began the reclamation work, we soon learned that the clear-cutting and selling of the wood wasn’t just happenstance. It wasn’t just individual scavengers passing through. There was a depraved and conniving man named Uriah organising it all. He didn’t have any more right to this land than the other squatters, but he was a trickster, a deceiver. He did favours for people and then held them accountable. He lent money on ill terms. Most of the squatters in the area were obligated to him in some way or another, and the others feared him, for those who opposed him met with violent ends. By the time we arrived, he controlled them all. I think he must have been an old slaver or something because he seemed to relish having power over other people. He seemed obsessed with controlling everything.’

  ‘But my uncle had bought the land,’ Braeden said, confused.

  ‘That’s right, he had. Over one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres, covering four counties. He had bought it lawfully from its original owners, but these marauders of the forest did not care who legally owned the land, and neither did Uriah. They had been cutting these trees for years and no one was going to stop them. To Uriah, this land was his domain and his alone.’

  His domain and his alone, Serafina thought.

  ‘None of us realised when we started the reclamation of the land and the construction of the house that we’d have to deal with this Uriah fellow. Despite the power he had held over the local squatters for many years, it was obvious to us that Uriah’s better days were behind him. I think he might have been injured in the war or weakened by a devastating disease. He was in bad shape. He seemed desperate in his dealings with us, like he was barely hanging on to the last vestiges of the corrupted empire he’d built here. We couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just give up his illegal claims and go away. It was like his very life depended on it. In any case, he obviously wasn’t the type of man to go easily. He started putting up a serious fight.’

  ‘What did my uncle do?’ Braeden asked.

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t let a man like Uriah get anywhere near your uncle, of course. But Mr McNamee, the estate superintendent, had plenty of run-ins with the wretch, as did Mr Hunt, the house’s architect, and I. One confrontation after another. We began bypassing Uriah and dealing with the squatters directly. We gave them jobs and farmland to work. We needed the help and they were happy to join us. Many of them settled into cabins on the property or found homes in town. But Uriah hated us, challenged us constantly, telling us what we could and couldn’t do, what boundaries we could and couldn’t cross, as if he himself owned the land. We were in the right by morals and the law, so it would have been easy to discount the man, but I tried to deal with him fairly. I never trusted him, but I sensed that he was far more sinister than he seemed, and I was loath to make him too sharp an enemy. There’s nothing more dangerous than a desperate man. But Mr Hunt didn’t share my trepidation of Uriah. He treated him with all the respect he deserved. Which is to say, none at all. And Uriah despised Mr Hunt for it.’

  ‘But Uriah didn’t know Mr Vanderbilt?’ Serafina asked, confused.

  ‘Not personally, no, but he definitely knew of him. Uriah hated George Vanderbilt most of all, for he saw George as the master of all his misfortune.’

  ‘But it wasn’t my uncle’s fault!’ Braeden insisted.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ Mr Olmsted agreed. ‘But Uriah didn’t see it that way.’

  Serafina and Braeden remained quiet as the footman entered the room with a silver tray of fine Biltmore-monogrammed china, and then proceeded to serve Mr Olmsted his tea. Slowly, piece by piece, he set out a finely decorated saucer, a teacup, a teapot, a bowl of sugar, a teaspoon and a creamer, and then he slowly poured the steaming tea while they all waited in silence. It seemed like it was taking forever. When the footman was finally gone, Serafina jumped right back into the conversation.

  ‘What happened to Uriah in the end?’ Serafina asked.

  Mr Olmsted took a sip of his tea and then set the cup down on its saucer with light tink. ‘Well, he confronted us one too many times, and we all lost our patience. I’m afraid we had a most violent exchange of words. Finally, Mr McNamee ordered his security men, more than twenty armed men on horseback, to tie Uriah’s hands and take him away by force.’

  ‘What did they do to him?’ Braeden asked.

  ‘They took him by train to the coast. I believe they mentioned something about putting him on a ship bound for foreign lands. In any case, we were glad to see the back of him.’

  ‘Uriah must have been very angry about that,’ Serafina said.

  ‘Anger doesn’t begin to describe his state of mind. I won’t repeat all the obscenities he cast at us, but he cursed us up and down and vowed he’d return and kill us all. “Even if it takes me a hundred years,” he screamed, “I’m going to come back here and burn your house to the ground!”’

  ‘Wait,’ Serafina said. ‘Is that actually what he said, those exact words?’ A lump formed in her throat, for she already knew the answer. She could just imagine hearing him scream those words. In fact, she already had.

  She sucked in a breath. At long last, she had finally marked her enemy. This man, Uriah, was a shifter and a conjurer like Waysa had said, kin to the white-faced owl, sorcerer of the dark arts, his power tied to the land. He was the old man of the forest that the mountain folk told stories about around their fires at night. He was the deceiver and master of the tree-killing squatters that Mr Olmsted had seen. And he was the e
nemy that her mother and father and the other catamounts had fought against and weakened twelve years before. By the time of Biltmore’s construction, Uriah could no longer hold on to his malicious realm. But when he was cast out into the world he began regathering his strength, finding new dark arts to wield, turning his pain and his hatred into a black and sinister magic more powerful than ever before – all so that one day he could come back to these mountains, burn Biltmore to the ground and reclaim his dark domain.

  She knew now that when she had put on the Black Cloak it had deceived her, tried to convince her that it had been created for good, but it hadn’t. Uriah had pulled Mr Thorne into his web of deceit and sent him into Biltmore to gather souls, to gather power. And now Uriah was making the Twisted Staff to give him control over the animals. Uriah wanted the people, and the animals, and the forest, and the land, and he was going to use his demons and his devices to do it. He wanted to control it all.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Braeden asked, touching her arm.

  She blinked and pulled herself out of her thoughts and looked at him. ‘Yes, I’m all right, I’m sorry, go ahead.’

  ‘Mr Olmsted,’ Braeden asked, ‘would it truly be possible for someone to burn down Biltmore?’

  ‘I’m not the architect, but I can tell you what I know.’

  ‘Pardon me, Mr Olmsted,’ Serafina interjected suddenly as a thought came into her mind. ‘What happened to Mr Hunt?’

  ‘In the last year of the house’s construction, just a few months before the greatest work of his life was completed, our friend Mr Hunt sadly passed away.’

  ‘He died?’ Braeden asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. We were all very shocked and devastated by the terrible turn of events.’

  ‘How did he die?’ Serafina asked.

  ‘He got a cold first, and then a bad cough, and then his gout flared up. The doctors weren’t sure, but in the end, it appeared that he died of heart failure.’