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

“Zoe, stop it,” said Earnest softly. Then he looked sadly at me, his pale grey eyes shadowed by long, thick lashes.

I was in shock. But before I had time to collect myself, the large doors opened and Hieronymus Behn stepped into the corridor. I hadn’t seen him earlier that evening when I’d been collected from the train. I hardly recognized him in the full muttonchop whiskers then in fashion, but underneath, the outline of his handsome, sculptural face remained virile and strong, lacking the soft complacency one often found in the Austrian upper classes. He seemed in complete command of the situation, unmoved by any such horrors as Zoe described that might lie beyond those doors.

“Lafcadio, you may come in now and see your mother,” Hieronymus informed me. But when I tried to stand I found my legs were trembling, and the cold lump moved into my throat, where it stuck like a block of ice.

“I’ll come too,” Zoe announced, on her feet beside me, her small hand thrust into mine. As she marched toward the doors with me in tow, my stepfather remained in our path. His brow furrowed slightly and he seemed about to speak. But just then Earnest stood up and joined us.

“No, we’ll all go in there together, we children,” he said quietly. “I know Father will think that best, since it will tire our mother the very least.”

“Of course,” said Hieronymus after only a heartbeat’s pause, and he stepped aside for all of us children to pass through the high paneled doors.

This was the first time, but it was not to be the last, that I would see the quiet self-possession of Earnest prevail over the clear and strong-willed intentions of Hieronymus Behn. No one else could ever do so.

Despite my late father’s wealth, the grandeur of our plantations in Africa, or the resplendence of the many estates I’d since seen around Salzburg, I had never once in my young life set foot inside a room as grand as the one that lay behind those doors. It was as awesome as the interior of a cathedral: the high ceilings, lavish furniture and accessories and hangings, the rich, jewellike colors of imported stained-glass lamps, the silky, liquid lines of crystal bowls filled with flowers, the mellow sheen of polished pieces of costly Biedermeier.

Zoe had told me, as we’d waited in the hall, that the lower floors of our house had already been converted to that new energy source electricity, which I knew had been installed a decade ago by Thomas Alva Edison himself, at the Schönbrunn Palace right here in Vienna. But my mother’s room was lit by the soft yellow glow of gas lamps, and warmed by a fire that flickered behind the panels of a low glass screen set before the hearth across the room.

I hope never to see such a sight again as that of my mother lying in the enormous canopied bed, her face bleached whiter than the lace counterpane. She weighed next to nothing. She was like a sucked-out husk about to crumble to dust and blow away. The cap covering her head could not conceal that her hair had been shaved—but thank God it hid the rest of the story.

I should never have believed this was my mother. In my childish memory, she was the beautiful woman who’d sung me to sleep with her lovely voice until the age of four. When she turned those watery blue eyes on me now, I wanted to cover my own eyes and to run, sobbing, from the room; I wanted not to think again of my lost childhood, of an abandonment that now could neither be undone nor atoned for.

My stepfather leaned with folded arms against the dark wainscoting beside the entry doors, his cold, immobile eyes focused upon the bed. A small group of servants hovered near the hearth, some silently sobbing or holding each other’s arms, watching as we children crossed the room to our mother’s bedside. God help me, but I only wanted her to vanish as if swallowed by the earth. As if in support, Zoe’s tiny hand squeezed mine, and I heard Earnest’s voice beside me as we reached the bed.

“Lafcadio is here, Mother,” he said. “He would like your blessing.”

Our mother’s lips were moving, and Earnest again helped by lifting little Zoe up onto the bed. He poured out a glass of water and handed it to Zoe, who fed it drop by drop between our mother’s parched lips. She was trying to whisper something, so Zoe took it upon herself to translate. I found it eerie and unnatural to hear what were perhaps the last words of a dying woman emerging from the rosebud lips of a six-year-old child.

“Lafcadio,” my mother said via little Zoe, “I give you my blessing with all my heart. I want you to know I feel the greatest pain that we’ve been parted for so long. Your stepfather thought … we believed it best for your … education.”

Even whispering through Zoe seemed a great effort, and I was frankly praying she’d find herself too weak to go on. Of the many reunions with my mother I’d naturally imagined over the years, none had been like this: a leave-taking before teary onlookers, being barely welcomed at the last possible moment into a family of complete strangers. It was positively ghoulish; I could barely wait for it to end. I was so distraught, I nearly missed the critical words:

“… so your stepfather has generously offered to adopt you, taking responsibility for your well-being and education, as if you were one of his own children. I pray you’ll embrace and care for one another as such. I’ve signed the papers only today. You are now Lafcadio Behn, full brother to Earnest and Zoe.”

Adopted me? Good lord! How could I become the son of a man I scarcely knew? Was I