Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (9 page)

Serafina did not reply.

‘Beggin’ your pardon, miss,’ the maid said, ‘but you don’t want to go up there lookin’ like that.’

‘This is the way I look,’ Serafina said fiercely as she gazed steadily at the girl.

‘I mean your dress, miss,’ the girl said.

‘It’s the only one I have,’ Serafina said.

The maid nodded, seeming to understand. ‘Then let me lend you something. My day-off dress or my Sunday dress, anything. But not . . .’

‘But not this,’ Serafina said, gesturing towards the burlap sack she was wearing.

‘I ain’t heard nothin’ but good things about your pa,’ the maid said sheepishly. ‘People say he can fix just about anything ’round here. But, beggin’
your pardon, miss, I think we can agree that he ain’t no dress designer.’

Serafina smiled. She was absolutely right about that. ‘And you’re going to help me?’ she asked tentatively.

‘If you want me to,’ the girl said, smiling a little.

‘What’s your name?’ Serafina asked.

‘I’m Essie Walker.’

‘I’m Serafina.’

‘The girl who brought the children back,’ Essie said, nodding. She already knew who she was and seemed pleased to meet her.

Serafina smiled and nodded in return. T.G.W.B.T.C.B. wasn’t quite as catchy as C.R.C., but she liked it.

As she looked at Essie more closely, it seemed to her that she had a gentle face, without any deceit or guile, and a warm, friendly smile.

‘Where do your people bury, Essie?’ Serafina asked, which was how she’d heard her pa ask other mountain folk where they were from.

‘I don’t rightly know,’ Essie said. ‘My ma and pa passed away when I was but one or two. My nanny and papaw raised me for a while, out on a farm up Madison County way,
pert nigh Walnut, but when they passed, I didn’t have nowhere to go. Mrs Vanderbilt heard about me and took me in and gave me a bed to sleep in. I told her I wanted to make myself
useful.’

‘You’re pretty young for being a maid at Biltmore,’ Serafina said.

‘Youngest maid ever,’ Essie said, smiling proudly. ‘Come on, let’s go. We’ll get ya sorted out.’ Essie reached for Serafina’s hand, but Serafina
reflexively pulled away, snapping her whole body back before Essie was even close to touching her.

Essie caught her breath, startled by Serafina’s quick movement.

‘You’re a mite skittish, aren’t ya?’ Essie said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Serafina said, embarrassed.

‘It’s all right,’ Essie said. ‘We’ve all got somethin’ that spooks us, right? But come on. Time’s a-tickin’.’

Essie turned and bolted up the stairs. Serafina followed easily right behind her. The two of them ran up three flights, then darted through a small doorway that led to a back corridor, then up
another stairway to the fourth floor. Essie led them down a tight passage that ran beneath the north tower, past a cluster of maids’ rooms, round a corner, down six steps and through the main
servant hall, where three maids and a house girl were gathered around the fireplace on their break.

‘Don’t pay us no mind,’ Essie called as she and Serafina ran through the room. They dashed down a long, narrow corridor with a Gothic arched ceiling wedged beneath the steep
angle of the mansion’s slanted rooftop. There were twenty-one rooms on the fourth floor for the maids and other female servants. And Essie’s room was the third on the right.

‘We’ll duck in here, miss,’ Essie said as Serafina followed her in.

During her nightly prowls, Serafina had sometimes snuck into one of the maids’ rooms when the maid went down the hall to the water closet, so she had seen the clean, plainly finished rooms
before. But Essie had made up her room’s simple white metal bed with soft pillows and an autumn quilt. To Serafina, it looked like a perfect warm spot for curling up in the late-afternoon
sun. But she had a feeling Essie didn’t get much time for napping. A clump of wrinkled clothing lay across the splint-reed chair, two of the drawers on the chestnut dresser were pulled out
and there was water left over in the basin on the washstand.

‘Pardon the mess, miss,’ Essie said, quickly picking up the underclothing from the floor and pushing the dresser drawers shut. ‘Lord protect me if Mrs King comes up for an
inspection this afternoon, but five o’clock comes awful early some mornin’s. Wasn’t thinkin’ on company when I left.’

‘It’s all right,’ Serafina said. ‘You should see where I sleep.’

‘I was all blurry-eyed this mornin’ on account of I stayed up with that awful Mr Scrooge,’ Essie said as she moved the clothes off the chair. Hearing these words,
Serafina’s ears perked right up. Who was this Mr Scrooge? But then she saw a copy of
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens on Essie’s nightstand, piled with some Asheville
newspapers, a Bible and a scrap of what looked like Mrs King’s weekly work schedule. Serafina realised with a bit of a shock that Christmas was only a week away. The tan leather-bound book
with gold-leaf lettering on the front looked suspiciously like the same edition of
A Christmas Carol
that Serafina had ‘borrowed’ from Mr Vanderbilt’s collection the year
before.
So I’m not the only one who steals Mr Vanderbilt’s books
, Serafina thought with a smile.

Across Essie’s dresser lay all manner of feminine accoutrements: hairbrushes, hairpins, little tins of ointment and a glass bottle of Essie’s lemon scent, which Serafina could smell
from a country mile away. The room’s cream-coloured walls were cluttered with scraps of Essie’s sketches of flowers and autumn leaves. Serafina knew that she should be doing her job,
creeping through the shadows, and spying on Biltmore’s guests, or at least worrying about the interrogation that was minutes away, but she could not resist the temptation of seeing a little
bit of Biltmore up close in a way she never had before.

In the centre of one of the room’s walls was mounted a single Edison lightbulb. Serafina’s pa had told her with a swell of his chest that Mr V. was friends with Mr Thomas Edison and
liked using all the latest scientific advancements.

Seeing all this amazed Serafina. Essie had her own lightbulb! Serafina knew from her pa that many of the mountain folk of western North Carolina were living in clapboard shacks and log cabins
without electricity, central heating or indoor plumbing. Many of them had never even
seen
a lightbulb, let alone had one for their own particular use. But Essie had made herself a cosy
little den up here on the fourth floor, like a tiny mouse nesting up in the attic, where no one would ever find her.

A window set into the room’s roof-slanted wall provided something that Serafina, a denizen of the basement, seldom beheld from this height: a mesmerising westward view across the Blue
Ridge Mountains. The clear sight of Mount Pisgah rising in the distance above the other peaks caught her eye. A few nights after she and Braeden had defeated the Man in the Black Cloak, they had
snuck up onto the rooftop to celebrate their victory. She remembered sitting under the stars with him, looking across the mountains, as Braeden explained how that peak was more than nineteen miles
away, but it was still on the estate. He had marvelled at how it took a day to get there on horseback, following twisting, rocky trails through the mountains, but a hawk soaring on the wind could
simply tilt its wing and be there in a moment.

Smiling, Serafina turned and looked around Essie’s room as Essie watched her with interest. ‘I ain’t got it too bad, do I, miss?’

‘Not too bad at all,’ Serafina agreed. ‘I like it here.’

Essie pulled a nicely made beige day dress off one of the hooks on the wall. ‘It’s my Sunday best,’ she said, handing it over to Serafina. ‘It ain’t nothing fancy
compared to what the ladies wear, but –’

‘Thank you, Essie,’ Serafina said, gently taking it from her. ‘It’s perfect.’

Essie kept talking as she turned round so Serafina could change.

‘I’m a chambermaid now, but I’m fixed on being a lady’s maid someday,’ Essie said. ‘Maybe serve the lady guests when they come, or even Mrs Vanderbilt
herself. Do you know Mrs V.?’

‘Yes,’ Serafina said as she pulled off her burlap dress. Goose bumps rose up on her bare legs and arms, half chill and half nervousness. It felt so odd to be undressing when there
was someone else in the room.

‘I thought you must know her, you being you and all,’ Essie continued.

The fact was that Serafina had become very fond of Mrs Vanderbilt over the last few weeks and had enjoyed their talks together, but she hadn’t seen her around the house in several
days.

‘My friend’s been a-goin’ to the girls’ school Mrs V. set up, learning how to do her numbers and weave fabric on the loom,’ Essie said. ‘Mrs V. wants all the
girls to get some sort of education so that they can fend for themselves if they have to.’

‘I think she’s very kind,’ Serafina said as she tried to figure out how to get into the dress. It seemed to have a bewildering array of buttons and drawstrings and other
complications.

‘Kind as kind can be,’ Essie continued. ‘Did you hear about the dairy boy? Two weeks ago, a dairyman and his eldest son got awful puny, real bad sick, liketa died, so Mrs V.
went on over to their cabin with a basket of food to help the family get through for a while. When she saw the boy was on the down-go, she had the menfolk haul him into her carriage, and she carted
him all the way to the hospital in Asheville.’

‘What happened to the boy?’ Serafina asked as she finally figured out how to slip into the dress and fasten up the last of the buttons.

‘He’s still mighty sick,’ Essie said. ‘But I hear they’re taking good care of him down there.’

‘You can turn around now,’ Serafina said.

‘Oh, miss!’ Essie said. ‘That’s a whole heap better, believe me. Come over to the mirror and take a look while I fix your hair.’

Essie didn’t seem to care that Serafina was different from everyone else, that her face was scratched, her eyes too large and the angle of her cheeks unusually severe. She just went
straight to work. ‘This hair of yourn!’ she said, and started tugging away at it like it was a bushel of misbehaving ferrets. ‘We ain’t got time for me to do a proper job,
but we’ll get it wrangled up.’

As Essie worked, Serafina found herself looking into the mirror and noticed something odd. There appeared to be chunks of long black hair growing among the rest that she’d never seen
before.

‘What’s wrong, miss?’ Essie said, seeing her frown.

‘My hair is brown, not black,’ she said, mystified as she raised her hand slowly up to her head and touched the black strands.

‘You want ’em gone, miss? I used to cut my mamaw’s grey hairs out all the time. They’d come in all long and wiry like they’d drunk too much moonshine, and
we’d cut ’em out quick as they came.’

‘Just yank ’em,’ Serafina said.

‘That’s gonna hurt, miss. There’s a lot of ’em.’

‘Just grab ’em hard and yank ’em out,’ Serafina insisted. If she didn’t have enough problems going to the main floor for all to see, now she had strange things
growing out of her head. She looked hideous.

Essie selected the strands of black hair and pulled so hard that it tugged Serafina’s head back.

‘Sorry, miss,’ Essie said.

‘Keep goin’,’ she said. As Essie worked, Serafina decided to ask a question about what she’d seen earlier that morning. You said you’re fixin’ to be a
lady’s maid. Have you served that new girl who’s been visitin’?’

‘The English girl,’ Essie groaned, making it pretty clear she was none too keen on her.

‘You don’t like her?’ Serafina asked, amused.

‘I don’t trust that girl any farther than I can throw her, coming in here with all her fancy high-and-mighty airs and puttin’ a bead on the young master first thing.’

Serafina wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by all that, but it occurred to her that someone in Essie’s position, working in the rooms on the second and third floors, might see
things that she herself did not.

‘What about the murder investigator who came in last night?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Not yet, but I heard from one of the footmen that he had all sorts of trunks and cases hauled up to his room, filled with strange instruments of some kind. He’s been giving all the
servants orders, demanding this and that.’

That doesn’t sound good
, Serafina thought.

Having yanked out several chunks of black strands, Essie picked up her brush and started brushing Serafina’s hair in long, pulling strokes. It felt so strange but so oddly pleasant to have
someone pull a brush through her hair, the sensation of the drag on her roots, and the detangling of her hair, and the gentle rake of the soft bristles against her scalp. She had to do everything
she could to keep from purring.

‘Can I ask you a question, miss?’ Essie asked as she brushed. ‘Ya know, Mrs King keeps tellin’ all of us girls to mind our own business, but everyone’s been
talkin’ about it all the same. We all want to know what’s goin’ on.’

‘Going on with what?’ Serafina asked uncertainly.

‘With Mrs V.,’ Essie said. ‘She didn’t come out of her room for breakfast this mornin’, and she’s been feelin’ so poorly lately that we hardly see her.
I’m sure she’ll get through it, whatever it is, but I was just wonderin’ if you’ve heard anything.’

‘I didn’t realise she was down sick,’ Serafina said as a knot formed slowly in her stomach. That explained why she hadn’t seen her.

‘She’s been sick as a dog some days,’ Essie continued. ‘Then other times she perks up for a while. We seen the doctor a-comin’ and a-goin’. We all just want
to know if she’s goin’ to be all right.’

‘I honestly don’t know, Essie. I’m sorry,’ Serafina said. The news that Mrs Vanderbilt was sick hung heavy in her heart. ‘But when I hear something, I’ll be
sure to tell you.’

‘I’d be much obliged,’ Essie said, nodding. ‘And I’ll do likewise.’

Finally, Essie set down the hairbrush. She took Serafina’s hair in her hands, wrapped it round and rolled it up into a loose twist on her head. Then she fastened it in place.

‘There you go, miss,’ Essie said. ‘I think that will do ya for a little while.’