Serafina and the Black Cloak. Robert Beatty

since, lay sleeping on the cot he’d secretly built behind the supply racks. Embers glowed in the old metal barrel over which he had cooked their dinner of chicken and grits a few hours before. They had huddled around the cook fire for warmth as they ate. As usual, she had eaten the chicken but left the grits.

      ‘Eat your supper,’ her pa had grumbled.

      ‘Did,’ she had answered, setting down her half-empty tin plate.

      ‘Your whole supper,’ he said, pushing the plate towards her, ‘or you’re never gonna get any bigger than a little shoat.’

      Her pa likened her to a skinny baby pig when he wanted to get a rise out of her, figuring she’d get so furious with him that she’d wolf those nasty grits down her throat despite herself.

      ‘I’m not gonna eat the grits, Pa,’ she said, smiling a little, ‘no matter how many times you put ’em in front of me.’

      ‘They ain’t nothin’ but ground-up corn, girl,’ he said, poking at the fire with a stick to arrange the other sticks the way he wanted them. ‘Everybody and his uncle likes corn ’cept you.’

      ‘You know I can’t stomach anything green or yellow or disgusting like that, Pa, so quit hollering at me.’

      ‘If I was a-hollerin’, you’d know it,’ he said, shoving his poker stick into the fire.

      By and by, they soon forgot about the grits and went on to talk about something else.

      It made Serafina smile to think about her dinner with her father. She couldn’t imagine much else in the world – except maybe sleeping in the warmth of one of the basement’s small sunlit windows – that was finer than a bit of banter with her pa.

      Careful not to wake him, she slunk off her mattress, padded across the workshop’s gritty stone floor and snuck out into the winding passageway. While still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and stretching out her arms and legs, she couldn’t help but feel a trace of excitement. The tantalising sensation of starting a brand-new night tingled through her body. She felt her muscles and her senses coming alive, as if she were an owl stirring its wings and flexing its talons before it flies off for its ghostly hunt.

      She moved quietly through the darkness, past the laundry rooms, pantries and kitchens. The basement had been bustling with servants all day, but the rooms were empty now, and dark, just the way she liked them. She knew that the Vanderbilts and their many guests were sleeping on the second and third floors above her, but here it was quiet. She loved to prowl through the endless corridors and shadowed storage rooms. She knew the touch and feel, the glint and gloom, of every nook and cranny. This was her domain at night, and hers alone.

      She heard a faint slithering just ahead. The night was beginning quickly.

      She stopped. She listened.

      Two doors down, the scrabbling of tiny feet on bare floor.

      She crept forward along the wall.

      When the sound stopped, she stopped as well. When the sound resumed, she crept forward once more. It was a technique she’d taught herself by the age of seven: move when they’re moving; stay still when they’re still.

      Now she could hear the creatures breathing, the scratching of their toenails on the stone and the dragging of their tails. She felt the familiar trembling in her fingers and the tightness in her legs.

      She slipped through the half-open door into the storeroom and saw them in the darkness: two huge rats covered in greasy brown fur had slithered one by one up through the drainpipe in the floor. The intruders were obviously newcomers, foolishly scrounging for cockroaches when they could’ve been slurping custard off the fresh-baked pastries just down the hall.

      Without making a sound or even disturbing the air, she stalked slowly towards the rats. Her eyes focused on them. Her ears picked up every sound they made. She could even smell their foul sewer stench. All the while, they went about their rotten, ratty business and had no idea she was there.

      She stopped just a few feet behind them, hidden in the blackness of a shadow, poised for the leap. This was the moment she loved, the moment just before she lunged. Her body swayed slightly back and forth, tuning her angle of attack. Then she pounced. In one quick, explosive movement, she grabbed the squealing, writhing rats with her bare hands.

      ‘Gotcha, ya nasty varmints!’ she hissed.

      The smaller rat squirmed in terror, desperate to get away, but the larger one twisted round and bit her hand.

      ‘There’ll be none of that!’ she snarled, clamping the rat’s neck firmly between her finger and thumb.

      The rats wriggled wildly, but she kept a good, hard hold on them and wouldn’t let them go. It had taken her a while to learn that lesson when she was younger, that once you had them, you had to squeeze hard and hold on, no matter what, even if their little claws scratched you and their scaly tails curled round your hand like some sort of nasty grey snake.

      Finally, after several seconds of vicious struggling, the exhausted rats realised they couldn’t escape her. They went still and stared suspiciously at her with their beady black eyes. Their snivelling little noses and wickedly long whiskers vibrated with fear. The rat who’d bitten her slowly slithered his long, scaly tail round her wrist, wrapping it two times, searching for new advantage to prise himself free.

      ‘Don’t even try it,’ she warned him. Still bleeding from his bite, she was in no mood for his ratty schemes. She’d been bitten before, but she never did like it much.

      Carrying the grisly beasts in her clenched fists, she took them down the passageway. It felt good to get two rats before midnight, and they were particularly ugly characters, the kind that would chew straight through a burlap sack to get at the grain inside, or knock eggs off the shelf so they could lick the mess from the floor.

      She climbed the old stone stairs that led outside, then walked across the moonlit grounds of the estate all the way to the edge of the forest. There she hurled the rats into the leaves. ‘Now get on outta here, and don’t come back!’ she shouted at them. ‘I won’t be so nice next time!’

      The rats tumbled across the forest floor with the force of her fierce throw, then came to a trembling stop, expecting a killing blow. When it didn’t come, they turned and looked up at her in astonishment.

      ‘Get goin’ before I change my mind,’ she said.

      Hesitating no longer, the rats scurried into the underbrush.

      There had been a time when the rats she caught weren’t so lucky, when she’d leave their bodies next to her pa’s bed to show him her night’s work, but she hadn’t done that in a coon’s age.

      Ever since she was a young’un, she’d studied the men and women who worked in the basement, so she knew that each one had a particular job. It was her father’s responsibility to fix the elevators, dumbwaiters, window gears, steam heating systems and all the other mechanical contraptions on which the two-hundred-and-fifty-room mansion depended. He even made sure the pipe organ in the Grand Banquet Hall worked properly for Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt’s fancy balls. Besides her pa, there were cooks, kitchen maids, coal shovellers, chimney sweeps, laundry women, pastry makers, housemaids, footmen and countless others.

      When she was ten years old, she had asked, ‘Do I have a job like everyone else, Pa?’

      ‘Of course ya do,’ he said, but she suspected that it wasn’t true. He just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

      ‘What is it? What’s my job?’ she pressed him.

      ‘It’s actually an extremely important position around here, and there ain’t no one who does it better than you, Sera.’

      ‘Tell me, Pa. What is it?’

      ‘I reckon you’re Biltmore Estate’s C.R.C.’

      ‘What’s that mean?’ she asked in excitement.

      ‘You’re