Serafina and the Twisted Staff. Robert Beatty

to realise that Braeden wasn’t falling for her precious-princess routine, the English girl changed her tone as fast as a rattlesnake changes the direction of its coiling path.

      ‘I would race you,’ she replied haughtily, ‘but I might get a speck of mud on my skirt from my horse kicking up dirt into your face as I passed you.’

      Braeden laughed, and Serafina couldn’t help but smile as well. The girl had a bit of spunk in her after all!

      As Braeden and the girl rode away down the path, Serafina could hear them talking pleasantly to each other, Braeden telling her about his horses and his dog, Gidean, and the girl listing the particulars of the gown she’d be wearing to dinner that evening.

      Serafina noticed that as Braeden and the girl entered the trees, the girl looked warily around her. The wilds of North Carolina must seem a dark and foreboding place to a civilised girl like her. She urged her horse forward to move closer to Braeden.

      Braeden looked at the girl as she came up alongside him. Serafina could no longer tell if Braeden was simply being polite or if he actually wanted to be this girl’s friend, but as they rode out into the trees she felt a strange queasiness in her stomach that she’d never felt before.

      Serafina could have easily followed them without their knowing it, but she didn’t. She had a job to do.

      Last night she’d seen the man in the forest send the carriage to Biltmore. She reckoned that the sensible place to look for signs that the intruder had arrived was the stables.

      She crept in through the back door, wary of Mr Rinaldi, the fiery-tempered Italian stable boss who didn’t take kindly to sneakers-about who might spook his horses. It was easy for her to move quietly on the perfectly clean redbrick floor, and even in the daytime there were plenty of shadows in the stables to take advantage of. The horse stalls consisted of lacquered oak boards trimmed in black railing with curving black grilles along the top. She began checking each of the stalls. Along with the Vanderbilts’ several dozen horses, she found a dozen others that belonged to the guests.

       Ga-bang!

      Serafina hit the floor. Her heart pounded. It sounded like a sledgehammer had hit the side of a stall. Having no idea what she was going to see, she peered down the stable’s central aisle. Disturbed dust floated from the ceiling down towards the floor, as if the earth itself had shaken, but otherwise the aisle was empty. She could see that four of the stalls at the end had been boarded up all the way to the ceiling. They were completely closed in, as if to make sure that whatever they held had no possibility of escape.

      She gathered herself up onto her feet and moved slowly down the aisle towards the boarded stalls. She could feel the sweat on her palms.

      The oak boards blocked her view of what was inside the stalls, so she crept up close, put her face to the wood and peered through the cracks.

      

      A massive beast hurled itself at the boards of the stall. The flexing wood struck Serafina in the head. The surprise of it sent her tripping backwards in fear. The creature inside kicked the stall boards and slammed them with its shoulders, snorting and thrashing. The boards bent and creaked under the pressure of the pounding animal.

      When she heard the stable boss and a gang of stablemen running towards the disturbance she’d caused, she scrambled into an empty stall, ducked down and hid in a shadow.

      She gasped for breath, trying to figure out what she’d just seen – a massive dark shape, black eyes, flaring nostrils and pounding hooves.

      A storm of questions flooded her mind as Mr Rinaldi and his men came charging down the aisle. The beast continued its terrible pounding and thrashing. The stable boss shouted instructions to his men to reinforce the boards. Serafina quickly climbed out of the back of the stall and darted from the stables before they caught sight of her.

      Those were the stallions! There was no question now. Whoever it was, the second occupant of the carriage was here.

      She scurried along the stone foundation at the rear of the house, pushed her body through the airshaft, crawled through the passage, pushed aside the wire mesh and entered the basement. Her presence at the estate had become known to the Vanderbilts a few weeks before, so she could theoretically use the doors like normal people, but she seldom did.

      She went down the basement corridor, through a door and then down another passageway. As she stepped into the workshop, her pa turned towards her.

      ‘Good mornin’,’ he began to say in a pleased, casual fashion, but when he got a look at her bedraggled state, he lurched back in surprise. ‘Eh, law! What happened to you, child?’ His hands guided her gently to a stool for her to sit on. ‘Aw, Sera,’ he said as he looked at her wounds. ‘I said you could go out into the forest at night to spend time with your mother, but you’re breakin’ my heart, comin’ home lookin’ like this. What’ve you been doin’ out there in them woods?’

      Her pa had found her in the forest the night she was born, so she reckoned he must have had an inkling of what she was, but he didn’t like dark talk of demons and shifters and things that go bump in the night. It was as if he thought that as long as they didn’t talk about those things they would not be real or come into their lives. She had told herself many times that she wouldn’t bother her pa with the details of what happened at night when she went out, and normally she kept that promise, but the moment her pa asked it all just started gushing out of her before she could stop it.

      ‘I had a terrible run-in with a pack of dogs, Pa!’ she said, choking up.

      ‘It’s all right, Sera – you’re safe here,’ her pa said as he took her into his thick arms and huge chest and held her. ‘But what dogs are you talking about? It wasn’t the young master’s dog, was it?’

      ‘No, Pa. Gidean would never hurt me. There was a strange man in the forest with a pack of wolfhounds. He sicced ’em on me somethin’ fierce!’

      ‘But where did he come from?’ her pa asked. ‘Was he a bear hunter?’

      She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. After he got out of the carriage, he sent the carriage on towards Biltmore. I think I saw the horses in the stables. And I saw a strange man with Mr Vanderbilt this morning. Did anyone unusual arrive at the house last night?’

      ‘The servants have been jabbering on about all the folk comin’ in for Christmastime, but I doubt the man you saw was one of the Vanderbilts’ guests. I’ll wager it was one of those poachers from Mills Gap that we ran off the estate two years ago.’

      Serafina could hear the anger seething in her pa’s voice. He was riled up that someone had done his little girl harm. He kept talking as he examined the crusted blood on her head. ‘I’ll go speak with Superintendent McNamee first thing. We’ll take a party out there to confront this fella, whoever he is. But, first off, let’s get you patched up. Then you rest a spell. Your lesson can wait.’

      ‘My lesson?’ she asked, confused.

      ‘For them table manners of yourn.’

      ‘Not again, Pa, please. I’ve got to figure out who’s come to Biltmore.’

      ‘I told ya. We’re fixing to hammer that nail till it’s sunk in deep.’

      ‘Sunk in my head, you mean.’

      ‘Yeah, in your head. Where else do ya learn things? Now that you and the young master are gettin’ on, you need to behave proper.’

      ‘I know how to behave just fine, Pa.’

      ‘You’re ’bout as civilised as a weasel, girl. I shoulda been schoolin’ ya more about the folk upstairs and how they go ’bout things, ’cause it hain’t like us.’