Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,22
see servants and guests searching the gardens, the Rambles maze, and the many footpaths. She couldn’t help but hope to see Braeden Vanderbilt among them.
She wondered if she could think of Braeden as her friend now, or if she was fooling herself. The God’s honest truth was that she didn’t even know what a friend was, other than what she’d read in books. If you meet someone face-to-face and they don’t hiss at you and bite you, does that mean you’re friends? But when she thought about it a little more, she remembered that she did in fact nearly hiss at the young master when they first met, so that wasn’t ideal. Maybe they weren’t friends at all. Maybe he thought she was nothing but a lowly dirt-scraper from the basement and she didn’t warrant a second thought. She probably should have told him right off that she was the C.R.C. That would have been a lot more impressive. As it was, she just wasn’t sure what sort of impression she’d made, except that she was dirty, rude, unkempt, and had bad hair.
She darted up the stairs to the first floor. She took advantage of the chaos of the search to scurry unseen from one hiding spot to another. She moved silently, padding swiftly on soft feet. The adults spoke so loudly and made such a galumphing noise when they stomped all over the place that they were easy to avoid.
She dashed over to the Winter Garden, where she hid beneath the fronds of the tropical plants.
As Mrs. Vanderbilt and two servants hurried down the corridor, Serafina scooted into the Billiard Room and made a narrow escape. She thought that even her rodent enemies would have been impressed by her quickness of foot on that particular maneuver.
Walled in rich oak paneling and appointed with soft leather chairs, the Billiard Room smelled of cigar smoke. Deep-hued Oriental carpets covered the floor. Black wrought-iron lamp fixtures hung down from the ceiling over the game tables. Animal heads and hunting trophies lined the walls. She liked those. The trophies on the walls reminded her of the rats she’d killed and laid at her pa’s feet. So she and the Vanderbilts had that much in common. On the other hand, she had stopped doing that when she realized that it was the catching she liked more than the killing.
Just as she was about to leave the room, a footman came in with one of the maids. Serafina quickly dove beneath the billiard table.
“Maybe she’s been giving us the slip at every turn, Miss Whitney,” the footman said, leaning down to look under the billiard table just as Serafina darted behind the sofa.
“She could be just about anywhere, Mr. Pratt,” Miss Whitney agreed, looking behind the sofa just as Serafina hid in the green velvet curtains that adorned the windows.
“Do you know if anyone has checked the pipe organ?” Mr. Pratt asked. “There’s a secret room back there.”
“The girl is a pianist, so she might be curious about the organ,” Miss Whitney agreed.
Taking a quick breath and using the curtain for cover, Serafina climbed up the window stile lickety-split, then wedged herself into the uppermost corner of the window. She had just enough time to see that Mr. Pratt was wearing white gloves, a black tie, and a black-and-white footman’s livery, but she took special notice of his black patent-leather dress shoes.
“What do you mean, she’s a pianist?” Mr. Pratt asked.
“Tilly, on the third floor, told me the girl’s some sort of musical prodigy, gives piano concerts all over the country,” Miss Whitney said, as she ran her hands through the curtains where Serafina had just been hiding.
Serafina held her breath and stayed very still. Miss Whitney was so close to her now that she could smell her sweet lavender-and-rose perfume. All Miss Whitney had to do was pull back the curtain and look up, and she’d see Serafina clinging there with a Cheshire smile. Despite her fear of being seen, Serafina couldn’t resist noticing the details of the maid’s outfit. She loved the pretty pink uniform with its white collar and cuffs, which the maids wore in the morning before changing into their more formal black-and-white uniforms in the afternoon.
“Come on. There’s no one in here,” Mr. Pratt said. “We’ll check the pipe organ.”
Serafina breathed a sigh of relief as Miss Whitney walked to the other side of the room.
Mr. Pratt pushed the oak-paneled wall just to the right of the fireplace.