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

“With pleasure,” he said, though it didn’t sound it. He turned and left the room.

It was snowing when we left the house the next morning, but dark skies and inclement weather did little to daunt Zoe, who was excited by being in on some kind of mystery—especially one involving a new brother whom she could instruct and bully. She could barely contain herself long enough to be bundled up by the servants before dragging me off to the stables where we children, I discovered, had our own conveyance: a carriage and four. It was already rigged by instruction of my stepfather, the harnessed horses pawing and the driver waiting high in his box. Nearby stalls held surreys and traps, and the family’s sparkling new motorcar.

I’d tossed sleeplessly all the night, filled with questions about Pandora’s cryptic communiqué.

This morning, in the warmth of the closed cab, as we clopped through the cobbled streets and I got my first good view of Vienna, I saw Earnest turn several times to glance at the rigid back of our driver through the isinglass window separating us. So I held my tongue and waited, becoming more overwrought moment by moment. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine what sort of actual danger—in a rarefied atmosphere like that of the Behn household, surrounded by servants and wealth—could befall a twelve-year-old child.

Pandora interrupted these thoughts. “Have you ever been to an amusement park before?” she asked with a smile. “The Volksprater, or people’s park, used to be the hunting preserve of the emperor Joseph II, the one who was the brother of Marie Antoinette and also a patron of Mozart. Today it has many interesting rides. There’s the carousel: English children call it a merry-go-round because it spins about in a circle. You sit on horses and they go up and down as the wheel turns, so it seems as if you’re riding. This one at the Prater hasn’t got only horses but an entire Tiergarten of animals.”

“Papa doesn’t permit us to go to the Prater,” said Zoe, sounding more than disappointed at this sorry fact.

“He says it’s filled with low-class workers who drink beer and eat sausages,” Earnest explained. “And when I said maybe they wouldn’t go outdoors to such a place in winter, Father said the Prater is closed in the winter—even the giant Ferris wheel.”

“As usual, your father is half right and half wrong,” Pandora said—a cheeky remark for a girl her age to make about a man of my stepfather’s position, whatever the nature of their relationship, which itself was shaping up as a real complexity. “The park may be closed for the winter, but I have special connections that don’t shut down in bad weather.”

By the time we reached the park, the weather had grown bitterly cold. The place did look awfully barren and deserted, completely shut down for the season. There were barriers at the gate that prevented our carriage from passing inside to the area where the big mechanical rides were located. Zoe was crushed.

“It isn’t far,” Pandora told us. “Lafcadio, you carry Zoe on your shoulders through these drifts. It will be easier going once we’re inside the park.”

We had the driver pull the carriage and horses beneath the shelter of a train trestle. Pandora tucked up her heavy skirts, I hefted Zoe onto my shoulders, and we marched through drifts around the barricades and into the silent white arcades of the park. When we reached the broad Hauptallee with its chapel of groomed trees where the paths had been cleared, I set Zoe down.

“Lafcadio, now we can all tell you what we couldn’t say last night,” Earnest said. “You see, Father didn’t want you to come here to Vienna at all; there were awful rows over it. If it weren’t for Pandora, you wouldn’t be here.”

There were rows over me? I looked at Pandora.

“How much do you know of your stepfather?” she asked.

“Practically nothing. I haven’t seen him or my mother in nearly eight years,” I said, with a bitterness I tried to suppress. Although I felt sick at the very idea that I was now the legal son of Hieronymus Behn, I felt awkward saying so before his two blood children walking beside me.

“Zoe and I don’t know Father well ourselves,” Earnest told me, kicking at the snow with his perfectly polished knee boots. “He’s always off at meetings or away on important business. We’re never alone with Mother either: my tutor or Zoe’s nanny or the servants are always about, just like last night.”

“Your mother is little more than a prisoner in her own house,” agreed Pandora. Then, when she saw my expression, she added, “I don’t mean to say she’s been chained up in the attic. But ever since moving here to Vienna eight years ago, she’s never been permitted to be alone. She’s watched by a complement of servants who read her mail. She has neither friends nor visitors, and she never goes outside the house unescorted.”

“But you said you’re her friend,” I pointed out.

I’d probed my mind a thousand times all these years, trying to make sense of my mother’s desertion of me, a desertion the more bitter in that she’d kept her other two children at her side. I’d believed—or longed to believe—that my stepfather was the cause behind it all. Was he really as evil a blackguard as I’d imagined? But Pandora’s revelations had just begun.

“After your mother married Hieronymus Behn, twelve years ago,” she said, “he parlayed your father’s fortune, including the mining interests your mother still held, into an international mineral and industrial consortium with holdings so broad they could no longer be managed from provincial Africa but only from a world capital like Vienna. Your stepfather soon learned that in Vienna it was not enough merely to have a rich and beautiful wife whose assets he could exploit with impunity. In order to gain access to the best drawing rooms, impeccable social