Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,10
many people. Something was definitely happening up there. We’ve got to keep to ourselves, you and I. Her pa’s warning played in her mind as she climbed. There ain’t no sense in people seein’ you and askin’ questions.
She slinked to the top of the stairway, then ducked into an alcove on the main floor that looked onto a huge room full of fancy-dressed people who seemed to be gathering for some type of grand social event.
Massive, ornately crafted wrought-iron-and-glass doors led into the Entrance Hall, with its polished marble floor and vaulted ceiling of hand-carved oak beams. Soaring limestone arches led from this central room to the various wings of the mansion. The ceiling was so high she had the urge to climb up there and peer down. She’d been here before, but she had always loved the room and couldn’t help marveling at it again, especially in the daylight. She’d never seen so many glistening, beautiful things, so many soft surfaces to sit on, and so many interesting places to hide. Spotting an upholstered chair, she felt an overwhelming desire to run her fingernails over the plush fabric. All of the room’s colors were so bright, and the surfaces were so clean and shiny. She didn’t see any mud or grease or dirt anywhere. There were brightly colored vases filled with flowers—to think! Flowers, actually inside the house. Sunlight flooded in from the sparkling, leaded-glass windows of the spiraling, four-story-high Grand Staircase and the glass-domed Winter Garden, with its spraying fountain and tropical plants. She squinted her eyes against the brightness.
The Entrance Hall teemed with dozens of beautifully attired ladies and gentlemen along with manservants in black-and-white uniforms helping them to prepare for a morning of horseback riding. Serafina stared at a lady who wore a riding dress made of white-piped green velvet and cranberry-red damask. Another woman wore a lovely mauve habit with dark purple accents and a matching hat. There were even a few children there, clothed as finely as their parents. Her eyes darted around the room as she tried to take it all in.
Serafina looked at the face of the lady in the green dress, and then she looked at the face of the lady in the mauve hat. She knew her momma was long dead, or at very least long gone, but all her life, whenever she saw a woman, she checked to see if the woman looked like her. She studied the faces of the children, too, wondering if there was a chance that any of them could be her brothers and sisters. When she was little, she used to tell herself a story that maybe she had come home one day to the house, muddy from her hunting, and her mother had taken her downstairs and stuck her in the belt-driven washing machine, and then went back upstairs and accidentally forgot about her, just spinning and spinning away down there. But when Serafina looked around at the women and the children in the Entrance Hall and saw their blond hair and their blue eyes, their black hair and their brown eyes, she knew that none of them were her kin. Her pa never talked about what her momma looked like, but Serafina searched for her in every face she saw.
Serafina had come upstairs with a purpose, but now that she was here, the thought of actually trying to talk to any of these fancy people put a rock in her stomach. She swallowed and inched forward a little, but the lump in her throat was so huge, she wasn’t even sure she could get a word out. She wanted to tell them what she saw, but it suddenly seemed so foolish. They were all happy and carefree, like so many larks on a sunny day. She didn’t understand. The girl was obviously one of these people, so why weren’t they looking for her? It was like it never happened, like she had imagined the whole thing. What was she going to say to them? Excuse me, everyone…I’m pretty sure I saw a horrible black-cloaked man make a little girl vanish into thin air. Has anyone seen her? They’d lock her up like a cuckoo bird.
As a tall gentleman in a black suit coat walked by, she realized that one of these men might actually be the Man in the Black Cloak. With his shadowed face and glowing eyes, there was no doubt that the attacker had been some sort of specter, but