Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,50

people and activity. Oil lamps glowed brightly in the night.

She and her pa couldn’t help but pause to see what the commotion was about. A returning mounted search party, a dozen riders strong, stormed into the inner courtyard, filling the air with the clatter of horse hooves striking the brick paving. They’d been looking for Clara Brahms and the other victims. As the riders dismounted and the stablemen hurried out to tend to the horses, the parents of the missing children gathered around.

Nolan’s pa, who was the stable blacksmith, begged for news of his son, but the riders shook their heads. They’d found nothing.

Poor Mr. Rostonov was there as well, struggling to ask questions in his Russian-hindered English as he held on to his daughter’s little white dog. The shaggy creature barked incessantly, growling at the horses as if chastising them for the failure of the search.

Watching Mr. Rostonov, the Brahmses, and Nolan’s pa in their desperate struggle to find their children, Serafina’s heart filled with an aching sadness. It made her guts churn to think about it, to think about her part in it all. She had to find the Man in the Black Cloak.

“Come on,” her pa said as he pulled her away. “This whole place is comin’ apart at the bolts, equipment breakin’ for no reason, folks losin’ their children. It’s a bad business all around.”

As they ate their dinner together huddled around their little cook fire in the workshop, her pa talked about his day. “I’ve been working on the dynamo, but I can’t figure out how to fix it. The floors upstairs are pitch-black. The servants had to pass out lanterns and candles to all the guests, but there weren’t enough of them to go around. Everyone’s frightened. With all the guests in the house and the disappearance of the children, this couldn’t have come at a worse time.…”

She could hear the pain in his voice. “What are you going to do, Pa?”

“I’ve gotta get back to it,” he said. It was only then that she realized that he’d stopped his work in order to look for her. “And you need to go to bed. No hunting tonight. I mean it. Just hunker down and keep yourself safe.”

She nodded her head. She knew he was right.

“No hunting,” he said again firmly; then he grabbed his tool bag and headed out.

As her father’s footsteps receded down the corridor, heading for the stairs that led down to the electrical room in the subbasement, she said, “You’ll figure it out, Pa. I know you will.” She knew he would never hear the words from so far away, but she wanted to say them anyway.

She found herself sitting alone in the workshop. The Man in the Black Cloak had taken a victim each night for the last two nights in a row. With the dynamo broken, she imagined him walking through the darkness of Biltmore’s unlit corridors tonight with a crooked smile on his face. It was going to be easy pickings for him.

She sat on the mattress behind the boiler. When she was out on the mountain ridge in the rain, this was all she wanted—to be dry and well fed and comfortable in her bed. But now that she was here, it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Her pa had told her to go to sleep, and she knew she should—her body was tired and sore—but her mind was a swirl of memories and sensations, hopes and fears.

There was only one person in the world who would believe what had happened to her in the forest that day. There was only one person who’d understand everything she’d been through, and he lived in a room on the second floor at the far end of the house. She missed him. She was worried about him. And she wanted to see him.

When she and Braeden were stranded in the carriage, they were together, they were on the same side, they were as close as close could be. But now that they were both back home again, he in his bedroom and she in the basement, he seemed farther away than when she was lost in the mountains. There were too many forbidden stairs and doors and corridors between them.

They ain’t our kind of folk, Sera, her pa had said, and she could only imagine what Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt would say about her if they knew she existed.

Using a wet rag she found in the workshop, she tended