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

of several important considerations, to wit: That my mother was not the well-bred, sensible Englishwoman the name Lady Stirling might suggest but a poor Dutch waif raised in a Calvinist orphanage. That her entire subsequent experience of life was to be kept in lavish estate by an older, doting husband. That she was still only thirty-two years of age, and still a great beauty, with only one dependent newly born child (myself). And that she was now one of the richest women in Africa, perhaps in the world—which could only make her the more appealing.

Mr. Rhodes did not think of these things, nor probably did my mother, for hers was not a material or grasping nature. But there would be others, quite soon, who would think of such concerns for her. The one who moved quickest, of course, was Hieronymus Behn.

Today it is impossible for those familiar with Hieronymus Behn as industrial magnate and ruthless deal-carver to imagine that in the year just after my birth, 1901, he came into my mother’s life in the guise of a poor Calvinist minister sent by the Church—undercover, even as the war raged on—to console her in her grief and bring her back to the fold of her own people and their faith.

My mother was brought to the fold, it would appear, almost as soon as they got up off their knees from that first prayer session. Not into the safe, protective fold of any church, however, but rather into the waiting arms of Hieronymus Behn. Three months after they met, when I was less than six months old, they were married.

It must be added that, religion aside, Hieronymus Behn’s appeal to a grieving widow was palpable. The tintype photographs taken at that time do not do justice to the man I knew as a child. I used often to try to contrast the pictures of my late father, to his advantage, with those of my new stepfather—but in vain. My father looked out of the frame with pale clear eyes, a handsome mustache, and, whether in military clothes or those of a gentleman, a romantic, swashbuckling air. Hieronymus Behn, by contrast, was what would have been described in those days as a magnificent piece of horseflesh: today we would call him a stud. He was the sort of man who, when he set his eyes upon a woman, seemed to be setting his hands on her instead. I’ve no doubt Hieronymus Behn knew precisely where and how to use those hands: he would use them often and well, reaching into others’ pockets as he amassed his great fortune. How could I know, at the time, that he’d already begun with ours?

When the war was over and I was two years old, Mother gave birth to my brother, Earnest. When Earnest was two and I was four, I was shipped off to a Kinderheim—a children’s boarding school—in Austria, a country to which I was told my family would soon relocate. When I was six, I received news there at my school in Salzburg that I now had a new little sister named Zoe.

It was only when I was twelve that I finally got word I would see my family, along with a train ticket to Vienna. It was the first time in nearly eight years that I had seen my mother. I did not know it would also be the last.

I learned that my mother was dying before I saw her.

I was sitting opposite large double doors in the big drafty hall, on a straight-backed chair upholstered in hard leather—and waiting. Beside me, to my left, waited two new acquaintances: my half brother and sister, Earnest and Zoe. The sister, Zoe, was fidgeting in her chair, yanking at her blond corkscrew curls, and trying to pull the carefully arranged ribbons out of her hair.

“Mummy doesn’t want me to wear ribbons!” she was complaining. “She’s very sick, and they scratch her face when I kiss her.”

This child’s rather odd personality was hardly that of a six-year-old girl. She was more like a Prussian officer. While the serious Earnest still had an awkward trace of that South African twang I’d lost in eight years at an Austrian boarding school, this little terror spoke in a bossy, patrician High German and possessed the self-containment of Attila the Hun.

“I’m sure your nanny wouldn’t want to displease her mistress by letting your ribbons scratch her,” I replied, trying to appease her so she’d settle down.

Though it seemed inappropriate to say “her mistress,” I found it hard to refer to the woman I knew was lying in a bed just beyond those doors as “Mother.” I wasn’t sure what I would feel when at last I saw her. I scarcely remembered her at all.

Our brother Earnest wasn’t saying much, just sitting there beside Zoe with his hands folded in his lap. His was a pale, almost flawlessly handsome version of the more ruggedly chiseled profile of his father, combined with that glorious ash blond coloring of our mother. I thought him really beautiful, like an angel from a painting—a combination that, in a rough boys’ school like mine, he would not have found an asset.

“She’s dying, you know,” Zoe informed me, pointing with her small hand toward the forbidding double doors across the hall. “This may be the last time any of us will see her—so the least they could do is make it so she can kiss me goodbye.”

“Dying?” I said, hearing the word echo in the darkened corridor. I felt something hard and numb forming within my chest. How could my mother be dying? She was so young the last time I’d seen her. And all those pictures of her on my dresser at school: so beautiful and so young. Illness, perhaps. But death was something I was totally unprepared for.

“It’s awful,” said Zoe. “Really disgusting. Her brains are spilling out. Not just her brains—there’s something hideous and creepy growing in the dark inside her head.