The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

Schliemann, who’d made his early fortune in the supply of military armaments during the Crimean War and was spending it lavishly in highly publicized and opportunistic quests for the lost kingdoms of Mycenae and Troy.

Clio had spent her young life studying ancient tongues, and tracing the origins of many objects she’d learned of in decaying documents she’d found in tombs, gravesites, and caves. She used this knowledge with some success in locating lost sites of power and grandeur, and in hunting down physical objects of great value—just as Schliemann, only by his careful reading of the classics, had at length found the tombs of Mycenae, containing the richest hoard of ancient treasure in the world.

In the year 1866, at age twenty-one, Clio met and married a Dutchman who, like Schliemann, was rich from the spoils of war. This man, Erasmus Behn, who’d invested in Schliemann’s archaeological projects, was a widower with one small son, Hieronymus, who would one day be my father. If the large fortune made by Heinrich Schliemann in armaments was used almost exclusively for the rape and pillage of mankind’s past, the fortune of my grandfather Erasmus Behn was earmarked for nothing short of a complete transformation of man’s future, all to be molded to his image. And something a bit more.

Among Erasmus Behn’s interests was the Utopian community he’d helped finance in Switzerland. It was based on many new theories abroad, including “triage,” the genetic culling and sorting that played a large role in the main field of scientific interest of his day: selective breeding. Techniques to accomplish improved strains of crops and livestock were experimented with in such Utopias, and Erasmus spent each summer in the Alps, visiting the site of his investment.

All this was anathema to Clio. Though raised a Swiss Protestant, she’d received a liberal upbringing, broad in taste and quite unusual for a girl of her day. Though the man she’d married was wealthy, intelligent, and handsome, it didn’t take long after their marriage for her to become disenchanted with everything about Erasmus Behn—especially his views on perfecting the world. She quickly realized she’d been yoked to a dour, strict-principled Calvinist who regarded women and children as little better than chattel, while holding himself and his kind superior to nearly everyone on earth.

Clio soon discovered, too, that Erasmus hadn’t married her only for her tawny blond beauty, healthy body, or clever mind, but rather to secure for himself the large financial estate that she, as an only child, would possess upon her father’s death—and, more important, the historically valuable collection of artifacts, talismans, and scrolls she’d helped collect, and would also inherit from her family.

Erasmus seemed mesmerized to the point of obsession with knowing more about the secrets of the past, as well as powers that might be garnered in the future, while remaining practically oblivious to the demands of the present. When Clio gave birth to their daughter, just two years after their marriage, Erasmus left her bed altogether, having exercised his genetic duties. After all, if you counted the son he’d produced by his earlier marriage, he’d fulfilled this duty not only once but twice! Though this was a situation common in upper-class marriages of the past century, our family’s progress was soon to take a very strange and different twist.

In summers, Erasmus took Clio to visit his utopian project in the Alps. It soon became clear he could ill afford to go on pouring money into the project so lavishly, year after year. But that was not all that attracted his interest in the region. In the vicinity was something that might prove of great value: the pagan shrines I mentioned, as well as caves, some dating back to Neanderthal times, that due to their inaccessibility were largely unknown and unexplored, except by a band of migrant Gypsies that sometimes summered nearby. With visions of gold artifacts and sugarplums dancing in his head—most of them planted by Schliemann’s recent splashy successes—Erasmus hoped to find something of value, even of great power. Interestingly, Clio agreed.

Clio hardly needed prompting to organize the Gypsies in support of her first love, archaeology. The summer after her daughter was born, she set off with her posse. As they explored the alpine caves together, Clio found the Gypsies extraordinarily knowledgeable in the meaning of artifacts they unearthed, and of their surrounding history even from ancient times. She began leaving more and more of her collection in their hands for safekeeping. But also she found wisdom in the ways of these people, who attracted her greatly—especially one.

Clio’s expeditions with the gypsies soon went farther afield. She returned with interesting objects and pottery. The most unusual piece, found in a cave between Interlaken and Bern, was a statue of an ancient bear goddess, along with a totem bear. Deeper in the same cave were some intriguing clay jars that looked very ancient, containing scrolls she at once set about trying to decipher.

On their return to Holland that fall, Clio was enraged to learn Erasmus had taken some of her documents and artifacts, and even sold several objects to boost a dwindling income from poorly chosen investments. More upsetting, he’d also appropriated a number of her notes and translations of what she believed the more historically valuable documents.

When confronted, Erasmus riposted by drawing Clio’s attention to those scrolls she’d more recently discovered, which she’d left in the hands of the Gypsies. He’d hoped these might lead to further treasure and he became insistent that, as her husband, by rights they belonged to him. Without telling Erasmus, Clio took everything of value still in her hands and locked it all away in a vault.

Their battles over the next six months were to prove many, heated, and lengthy, as Erasmus’s nine-year-old son Hieronymus was there to witness. The quarrels between his father and what he perceived as a difficult, tempestuous stepmother, who refused to do his father’s bidding, planted seeds in his young mind that would eventually produce a dark