The Magic Circle (24 page)

Plucking little Zoe like a loose pillow from the counterpane, she casually tossed the child over one shoulder. Zoe twisted her head to look at me upside down, and she raised one eyebrow in wise judgment, as if we shared an interesting secret.

“Frau Hermione,” Pandora said to my mother, “if I were a fairy here at your bedside, and I said that you could make three wishes before you died—one wish on behalf of each of your children—what would your wishes be?”

There was whispering amongst the servants—no doubt shocked, as I was, at the cavalier manner in which this new arrival had brushed aside the master of the household and was treating the mistress’s impending death and last wishes almost as a parlor game.

But far more surprising was the change in my mother. Color infused that deathlike pallor, flushing her cheeks with a rosy glow. As she and Pandora locked eyes, a beatific smile lit her face. Though I shall always swear that neither woman spoke a single word, it seemed that a communication passed between them. After a long moment, Mother nodded. When she closed her eyes, she was still smiling.

Pandora, with Zoe swinging from her shoulder like a fur neckpiece, turned toward the rest of us. “As you children know, it’s bad luck to cast wishes abroad on the winds: it breaks the spell,” she announced. “So I’ll tell each of you in secret your mother’s wish.”

Perhaps Pandora
was
a fairy or sorceress, as she seemed. She slid Zoe from her shoulder onto the bed and tugged the starchy hair ribbons, shaking her head. “My poor girl, you’ve been trussed and trimmed like a Christmas goose,” she told Zoe. And as if she knew of our earlier conversation outside in the hallway, she pulled the stiff ribbons from Zoe’s hair while whispering Mother’s wish into her ear. Then she said, “Now you can go and give your mother a kiss, and thank her for your wish.”

Zoe scrambled across the bed and did as bidden.

Then Pandora went to Earnest, whispered to him likewise, and the same procedure was followed.

I found it hard to believe that, where
I
was concerned, there’d be much more to say in the wish department. How could my mother make a wish for me when she’d just admitted that, behind my back, I’d been sold like chattel to Hieronymus Behn, who’d waste no time demolishing my future hopes as thoroughly as he’d done to my present and my past?

Maybe it was my imagination that my stepfather, who was still standing near me, stiffened as Pandora approached us in her rustling grey silk gown. For the first time since she’d entered the room, she not only seemed to take notice of him, she looked him directly in the eye, but with an expression I couldn’t fathom.

Putting her hand on my shoulder again, she leaned to my ear so her cheek brushed mine. I could smell the warm aroma of her skin and I tingled with the same excitement as before. But her next words, spoken with great insistence, made my blood run cold.

“You must show no reaction to anything—you must go along with whatever I say,” she whispered urgently. “We’re all in great danger because of your presence here—you most of all. I cannot explain until I can get you outside this house filled with spies and lies and pain. I will try to arrange this for tomorrow, understood?”

Danger? What sort of danger? I understood nothing, but I nodded my head to show I would make no reaction. Pandora pressed my shoulder firmly and went back to the bed, taking Mother’s hand as she addressed the servants.

“Frau Behn is happy to see her children together at last,” Pandora informed them. “But even so brief a visit has taken her strength. We must leave her to rest now.”

But before the servants had filed out, Pandora called to my stepfather across the room, “Herr Behn, your wife would also like you to have the carriage prepared first thing in the morning, so I may take the children for an outing around Vienna together before Lafcadio returns to his school.”

My stepfather’s eyes flickered for a moment as he stood beside me, halfway between the bed and the door. He seemed to hesitate before bowing his head slightly to her.

“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 credentials were needed. In prosperous Catholic Austria, any poor Dutch Calvinist roots must be quickly buried, along with stories about the unknown parentage and orphaned upbringing of your mother. Then too, there were cultural attainments expected of a woman in Hermione’s position: a command of the fine arts and music that she didn’t have.

“But this situation was to prove a great boon. For though, within the house, there was always some watchful eye, Hermione was permitted to help select tutors to give lessons to her and the children—lessons that would provide her first chance to be alone, if for just a brief time, with someone not under her husband’s total control. This was how your mother and I met: before me, she’d already interviewed a large number of tutors. But after spending only a few minutes with each, one after another, she found none who could meet the one criterion she secretly wanted.”

“Secretly?” I asked, surprised.

Pandora looked me in the eye with a strange expression and said, “You see, your mother was convinced she would be satisfied only with an instructor who came from Salzburg.”

“Salzburg!” I cried, as the truth suddenly struck me. “My mother wanted to find
me
—but
he
wouldn’t let her?”

Pandora nodded and went on: “I had a friend named August—Gustl for short—a young viola player who was studying at the Wiener Musik Konservatorium and giving music lessons on the side to help pay his rent. Gustl came from a town not far from Salzburg, and he knew I had family there. When your mother was interviewing tutors and she brought the conversation around to Salzburg, Gustl mentioned me, and that’s how I became music teacher to the Behn household.”

“And that’s how Pandora found you in Salzburg,” chimed in Zoe, “and how Mother and Earnest and I know so much about you!”

“But you never came to see me at Salzburg,” I pointed out.

“Did I not?” said Pandora, raising a brow.

We had reached the center of the park. There, where the hub of paths united, was the giant Ferris wheel Earnest had spoken of, dressed like tinsel with little dangling silver chairs, and so high that it disappeared into the heavy clouds. From the top, on a clear day, I was sure one could see the entire Ringstrasse, the magic circle that surrounded the city of Vienna. Beyond this was the carousel: prancing ostriches, giraffes, and wild stags that seemed strangely out of place in this dark wilderness of drifted snow. It was moving in silence, the circle wheeling mysteriously round and round without anything seeming to push it, as if the animals had been awaiting us.

Not far away on a stone bench sat a man wearing a peacoat and knit nautical cap, his back to us. He started to turn, as if expecting us. I grasped Pandora by the arm there on the path.

“
Why
has my stepfather kept me from my mother for so many years?” I demanded. “What sort of mother would permit it? Even if she was a prisoner as you say, surely she might have smuggled a letter or two in all this time—”

“Hush,” Pandora said impatiently. “I told you last night you were in danger. We’re all in danger, even here in this solitary place, if we’re overheard. It’s the money, Lafcadio—your father Christian Alexander’s money—the equivalent of fifty million pounds sterling in gold Krugerrands and valuable mining interests I spoke of. These were left in trust, for your mother to live from their income during her lifetime—and the balance to come to
you
upon her death. Don’t you see, she’s about to die! He’s seized control of the money; he forced her to sign those adoption papers, threatening to cut off all of the children if she refused. The woman is suffering tortures of remorse, not knowing what may become of any of you—”

“And Earnest and I want to run away with
you,
” Zoe completed her sentence.

“With me?” I objected, my mind racing madly. “But I’m not running anywhere. Where would I go? What would I do?”

“I thought you could keep a secret,” Pandora told Zoe firmly, tugging at a lock of hair that peeked from the child’s fur-trimmed bonnet. Then to me she said, “I want you to meet my cousin Dacian Bassarides, who will help explain the plan we have in mind. In winter he’s park custodian here at the Prater. In the summers …”

But my mind had completely stopped functioning. The young chap in the peacoat came up, took my gloved hand in his two, and smiled warmly as if we shared an intimate secret—as indeed we did! I was completely flabbergasted. Then, slowly, the pieces began to fall into place through the hazy forest of my thoughts.