Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) by Robert Beatty

Author:Robert Beatty [Beatty, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780317557
Publisher: Egmont UK Ltd
Published: 2016-07-11T12:00:00+00:00

Just before dawn, Serafina crept through the darkened forest that surrounded Biltmore. In the morning’s slow change from darkness to light, there was no breeze, no sound, just a stillness in the cold air and the breathing of the earth. The mist floated like long-stretching grey clouds among the branches of the trees. She was eager to find her way up to the house. But then she spotted the silhouette of what looked like a robed, hooded figure in the haze. She ducked down, squinting through the morning fog, trying to figure out who or what she was seeing. Was she too late? Was the conjurer already here?

The figure appeared to be a grey-bearded man with a walking stick moving slowly through the trees. As she studied him, he seemed to drift in and out of the mist, disappearing for several beats of her heart, then re-emerging again. Was it the old man of the forest? Then she saw him poke his walking stick into the ground, take something small out of his satchel, kneel down and bury it.

As she crept closer, she saw he wasn’t wearing the robes she’d thought she’d seen before, but a long, lightweight coat against the morning chill. It was the elderly stranger she’d seen walking into the forest with Mr Vanderbilt. And she’d seen him again standing with the other guests the night she fled.

She watched him, trying to understand what he was doing. He walked another twenty feet, then looked around, seemed to make a decision, and then knelt down again. It took her several seconds to realise that the small things he was pulling out of his satchel were acorns. He was planting trees.

Memories flooded into her brain like water that had been blocked behind a dam for many years. He wasn’t a stranger at all. She had watched this man years before. His name was Mr Frederick Law Olmsted. He was the landscape architect who had designed the grounds of Biltmore Estate, and he was one of Mr Vanderbilt’s closest friends and mentors. Biltmore had been his last and most ambitious project before he retired. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen him. Was it three years ago? Four? Mr Olmsted’s face was far older than she remembered, and his body more frail, like something had happened to him while he was gone.

When she was just learning to prowl the grounds, she had seen Mr Olmsted supervising hundreds of men constructing the gardens and the grounds according to his design. But there had been other times, quieter moments like this, when she saw him by himself, when he didn’t think anyone else was watching, walking alone with his knobby cane in his hand and his leather satchel over his shoulder, seeming to wander the fields and woodlands, planting tree after tree after tree, as if shaping the very future of the forest. It was as if he could envision in his mind what it would look like a hundred years hence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.