Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,65
match with the Mr. Thorne I’ve seen.”
“I know, I know,” Braeden said in exasperation. “That’s what I’m saying. He’s had a hard life, a bad life, but he turned himself around. He’s been nothing but kind to me. You have no cause to think ill of him.”
“Just finish the story you were telling me. What else? What happened to him? How’d he get here?”
“Mr. Bendel told me that one night, after drinking too much in a pub in one of the local villages, Mr. Thorne was walking home, stumbled off the road, and got lost in the woods. He fell into an old well that no one used anymore and was badly hurt. I guess he was stuck down there for two days. He can’t even remember who found him and helped him out of the well. But when he finally recovered from his injuries, he realized that he’d hit rock bottom in his life and would soon die if he didn’t change his ways. So he decided to make a better man of himself.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, thinking the whole story sounded like two buckets of hogwash, and that Mr. Bendel had been pulling Braeden’s leg.
“Mr. Thorne got a job working in a factory in the city. He learned about the machines and got promoted to manager.”
“The machines?” Serafina asked in surprise. “What kind of machines?”
“I don’t know, factory machines. But after that, he became an attorney.”
“What’s that?” she asked. She couldn’t believe all the stuff she didn’t know.
“A lawyer, sort of an expert on laws and crime.”
“How did he become an attorney when he was working in a factory?” The whole story was getting crookeder and crookeder.
“That’s the thing,” Braeden continued. “He worked and he applied himself and he made himself a better man. He traveled for a while, then he moved back here, bought a grand house in Asheville, and started buying land in the area.”
“Come on…” Serafina said incredulously. “You’re saying he went from a drunken, poverty-stricken wretch to a gentleman landowner?”
“I know the whole thing sounds impossible, but you’ve seen him. Mr. Thorne is a very smart man, he’s very rich, and everyone loves him.”
She shook her head in frustration. There was no denying any of that. But still, something wasn’t right.
She looked out across the valley and the mist, just thinking. Nothing about Thorne’s story made sense to her. It was like one of those tales that’s filled with half-truths and deceptions, little twists in the telling. And she’d learned from hunting rats that where things were ajumble, that’s where the rat had been.
“So where did your uncle meet him?” she asked.
“I think they were both being fitted for shoes at the custom shop downtown.”
“Which explains why Mr. Vanderbilt’s shoes sounded like his…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Why does Mr. Thorne always wear gloves?” she asked, seeing if she could pick up the scent on a different trail.
“I never noticed that he did.”
“Is there something wrong with his hands? He plays the piano with his gloves on. Doesn’t that seem very strange? And he was wearing leather gloves the morning the men found you in the carriage on the forest road, even though it wasn’t that cold. And you said he was an expert at machines.…Do you think he could break a dynamo so that not even the smartest mechanic in the world could fix it?”
“What kind of question is that?” Braeden asked in confusion. “Why do you—”
“And how did a Southern plantation owner learn Russian?”
Braeden shook his head, refusing to believe any of it. “I don’t know! Nobody’s perfect.”
“You said he was extremely smart, could even beat your uncle at chess.”
“Well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe he just made an honest mistake with Mr. Rostonov.”
“Then why did poor old Mr. Rostonov get so upset? He was as nettled as a badger in a porcupine fight. But he wasn’t just upset. He seemed scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of Thorne!”
“Why?”
Serafina shook her head. She didn’t know. Her thoughts were all discombobulated, but it felt like the clues to the mystery were swirling all around her. All she had to do was put them together. Where exactly was the rat hiding? That was the question.
“You told me that when your aunt met Clara Brahms she wanted you to be friends with her,” Serafina said, trying yet another path.
“Yes.”
“How did your aunt and uncle first meet the Brahms family?”
Braeden shrugged. “I don’t know. My uncle knew them