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

Wait! my brain cried as I tried to piece this all together. Something else was wrong with this picture. And this time I knew exactly what it was.

“Two children?” I said in horror. “You mean Christian Alexander was the father of both of Hermione’s sons—Lafcadio and Earnest? But how could that be?”

“This is the lie that lurks behind it all,” said Zoe. “Earnest was the one who exposed the truth of our family’s past, though it took him many long years to understand what treachery had been practiced on him and Lafcadio—separating them in childhood, lying about Earnest’s parentage. And all the while, they were full brothers, sons of the same parents: Hermione and Christian Alexander. Earnest came to Europe not long before Pandora’s death and confronted her. She must have known all along, he said, so why hadn’t she told him?”

“I think you’d better tell us,” I said to Zoe. “From the beginning—including Pandora’s connection.”

And she did. When Hieronymus Behn arrived in South Africa in the summer of 1900, he was almost forty years old, a Calvinist minister with one prospect—to find his half sister, bring her to her long-lost mother Clio, and thereby gain the inheritance he felt his stepmother owed him.

He found his beautiful blond sister a recent widow, age thirty-two, with her hands full. She had mineral concerns and estates to manage, a six-month-old child (Uncle Lafcadio) and another expected (Uncle Earnest). Hieronymus saw enormous potential for himself in the situation. He quickly and ruthlessly determined how to kill two birds with one small stone.

Claiming he was her cousin who’d been searching for her for years, Hieronymus convinced Hermione he’d fallen passionately in love with her. Orphaned at two, she had no way of knowing that the man who called himself her cousin was really her half brother. He literally swept her off her feet: they were married within weeks, and he assumed management of all her late husband’s properties.

But Hieronymus knew he would have to reveal their true relationship before taking Hermione back to Europe, or he wouldn’t be able to claim their estates from Clio. There was an additional problem: If Hermione revealed their marital status to her new-found mother, the promised inheritance would surely blow up in his face. Further, once Hermione had learned how she’d been deceived, she might try to dissolve the marriage due to consanguinity. But Hieronymus realized it would be difficult to do so if they’d already had a child of their own.

However, given the possibility that they might be incapable of producing a child, the only insurance Hieronymus could think of was to convince Hermione, as a bond of their love, to name him as legitimate father on Earnest’s birth certificate. It wasn’t until Earnest himself discovered, years later, through his own research, that he was only one year younger than Lafcadio—not two, as they’d always been told—that his suspicions became aroused, and he dug further.

A great deal was beginning to fall into place for me, too, given this unpleasant revelation. It made sense, for instance, that little Lafcadio was sent off, just as he was nearing school age, to a place like Salzburg where he knew no one at all. Sooner or later, if he’d remained in South Africa, he might have heard details from others about the situation of his father’s death, his mother and stepfather’s hasty marriage, and the peculiar timing of Earnest’s birth. It also made sense that when Hermione got pregnant with Zoe, Hieronymus would pack up and move the entire family to Vienna where no one knew anything of their background—and where, according to Laf’s story, his mother became a prisoner in her own house.

This scenario made it clear why Laf was so upset about my meeting Zoe—not to mention his obvious distaste for the woman from the beginning. After all, she represented in her own person the single piece of evidence of his mother’s carnal relationship with her own brother. But for every one thing that got cleared up, others seemed to get murkier.

“Where does Pandora fit into all this?” I asked Zoe.

“There was one person,” she said, “who’d encountered Hieronymus and Hermione early on, as brother and sister, and then again years later, as husband and wife. It was the child Clio had adopted in Switzerland to replace her lost daughter, and had taken under her wing. When Hieronymus Behn finally brought Hermione to Switzerland for the promised reunion with her mother, Clio signed the papers that released a large part of her trust to her daughter and stepson, little realizing the legal and fleshly bonds these two had already entered into. When they left, it was discovered that—like his father before him—Hieronymus had appropriated some of those ancient scrolls he felt should have been his by God’s destiny. Scrolls that by now belonged to Clio’s adopted daughter. Though it took many years for her to run them to earth, she found them at last: that child, of course, was Pandora.”

The rest of the story was easy enough to flesh out based on what I already knew from Laf, Dacian, and others: how Pandora later infiltrated the Behn household in Vienna with the aid of Hilter’s high school chum Gustl and befriended the imprisoned Hermione as her adopted sister; how Hieronymus failed to recognize the child he’d met so briefly, now a beautiful woman; how Pandora blackmailed Hieronymus and managed to bring young Lafcadio home for Hermione’s deathbed scene. But there was something else still unexplained. By Dacian’s account, Hieronymus forced Pandora to marry him, then threw her into the streets when she stole something he valued. But hadn’t Zoe then run off, too, with Pandora and the Gypsies? And if Laf’s story held water, both girls had been cozy, from square one, with Adolf Hitler.

“Where does Hitler connect to all this?” I asked Zoe. “From everything you’ve told us, it’s plain these were Clio’s manuscripts Pandora wound up with. But even if