Serafina and the Black Cloak

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Robert Beatty. Serafina and the Black Cloak

Contents

Acknowledgements

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To my wife, Jennifer, who helped shape

this story from the beginning,

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At night, when everyone else in the house went to sleep, she crept upstairs and snatched books to read in the moonlight. She’d overheard the butler boast to a visiting writer that Mr Vanderbilt had collected twenty-two thousand books, only half of which fitted in the Library Room. The others were stored on tables and shelves throughout the house, and to Serafina these were like Juneberries ripe for the picking, too tempting to resist. No one seemed to notice when a book went missing and was back in its place a few days later.

She had read about the great battles between the states with tattered flags flying and she had read of the steaming iron beasts that hurtled people hither and yon. She wanted to sneak into the graveyard at night with Tom and Huck and be shipwrecked with the Swiss Family Robinson. Some nights, she longed to be one of the four sisters with their loving mother in Little Women. Other nights, she imagined meeting the ghosts of Sleepy Hollow or tapping, tapping, tapping with Poe’s black raven. She liked to tell her pa about the books she read, and she often made up stories of her own, filled with imaginary friends and strange families and ghosts in the night, but he was never interested in her tales of fancy and fright. He was far too sensible a man for all that and didn’t like to believe in anything but bricks and bolts and solid things.

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