The Magic Circle (71 page)

Clio hardly needed prompting to organize the Gypsies in support of her first love, archaeology. The summer after her daughter was born, she set off with her posse. As they explored the alpine caves together, Clio found the Gypsies extraordinarily knowledgeable in the meaning of artifacts they unearthed, and of their surrounding history even from ancient times. She began leaving more and more of her collection in their hands for safekeeping. But also she found wisdom in the ways of these people, who attracted her greatly—especially one.

Clio’s expeditions with the gypsies soon went farther afield. She returned with interesting objects and pottery. The most unusual piece, found in a cave between Interlaken and Bern, was a statue of an ancient bear goddess, along with a totem bear. Deeper in the same cave were some intriguing clay jars that looked very ancient, containing scrolls she at once set about trying to decipher.

On their return to Holland that fall, Clio was enraged to learn Erasmus had taken some of her documents and artifacts, and even sold several objects to boost a dwindling income from poorly chosen investments. More upsetting, he’d also appropriated a number of her notes and translations of what she believed the more historically valuable documents.

When confronted, Erasmus riposted by drawing Clio’s attention to those scrolls she’d more recently discovered, which she’d left in the hands of the Gypsies. He’d hoped these might lead to further treasure and he became insistent that, as her husband, by rights they belonged to him. Without telling Erasmus, Clio took everything of value still in her hands and locked it all away in a vault.

Their battles over the next six months were to prove many, heated, and lengthy, as Erasmus’s nine-year-old son Hieronymus was there to witness. The quarrels between his father and what he perceived as a difficult, tempestuous stepmother, who refused to do his father’s bidding, planted seeds in his young mind that would eventually produce a dark and dangerous fruit.

The summer of 1870, when Hieronymus was ten years old and his baby sister had just turned two, Clio’s father died, and his rich trove of manuscripts and objects came into her possession. Her father sensibly left the money in trust, for the sole use of Clio and her descendants—and a private message to be opened only by her. Based on her father’s last letter, Clio planned an extended trek with the Gypsies across the Swiss border into Italy, leaving the children behind with their father. But this time Erasmus insisted upon accompanying her. He’d begun to suspect his young wife of holding back much she’d discovered—and he thought he might know why.

Then Clio simply disappeared one night with the Gypsies, leaving a note that she would be back by summer’s end. But that was never to be. From that point onward, event swiftly followed event almost as if directed by an unseen hand.

On July 19, 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and pandemonium ensued. The utopian commune swiftly dissolved, its outside funds cut off by the war. Erasmus Behn—with two children on his hands, a missing wife, and dwindling fortunes—knew he must hasten home to try to secure those of Clio’s documents and artifacts still in his possession, should Holland be overrun.

Erasmus was wounded while crossing the battle zone between Switzerland and Belgium. He barely managed to enter Holland with the children before he died. His little remaining money was used by the local church to provide for his son’s education. His daughter with Clio was sent away to a foundling home. To be separated by war seems the endless fate of our family, as for so many others. In this case, however, it will never be clear whether Clio’s permanent separation from Erasmus was accidental or planned. Had war not intervened, would she have returned?

Eight years after Erasmus Behn’s death, his son Hieronymus completed his education and entered training for the only profession, except the army, available to a boy with limited resources: the Calvinist ministry. His preparation served only to strengthen beliefs already well ingrained through ten years of living with his father. Indeed, the ideas inculcated in him by the church became his first passion.

Hieronymus Behn had come to resent his stepmother Clio bitterly. He irrationally saw her as having robbed him and his father of everything for which, in the Calvinist sense, they’d been “chosen.” She’d abandoned his father in wartime, going off with the Gypsies and stealing everything the family owned of value. In the darkness of his heart, Hieronymus suspected her of far worse, for who knew what the unbridled passions of a woman like that might have led her to? If only his father had gained the upper hand with this woman, his wife, as had surely been his right in the eyes of God, and under the law! Everything Clio owned, even before her marriage to his father, Hieronymus believed, should by rights now belong to
him
.

Instead, it was because of his stepmother Clio, Hieronymus reasoned, that he’d wound up receiving nothing better than a pauper’s education. He really cared nothing about his young half sister, who’d been sent off God knew where. After all, she was partly of Clio’s blood. It was his inheritance he wanted. He’d perused his father’s papers, kept for him by the church. He now had an excellent idea of the nature and value of those artifacts and documents his stepmother had hoarded and refused to let his father see or sell. They’d be worth far more today, when the value of such things was better understood. He resolved that one day he would find his stepmother and get his birthright back. This day of reckoning might be years in coming—but come, at last, it would.

In the year 1899 festivities were under way in countries throughout Europe, prematurely celebrating the dawn of the last century of our millennium, which didn’t legitimately take place until 1901. The Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna was illuminated for the first time by electric lights; Ferris wheels blossomed on the riverbanks of many cities; modern scientific technology flourished everywhere.

None of these new inventions, however, was so widely heralded both by the press and by popular opinion as a single ancient discovery. On Christmas Day of 1899, as workmen were repairing a water pipe deep in the foundations of the castle overlooking the town of Salzburg, they uncovered a large golden platter that was believed to predate, by one thousand years, the time of Christ.

Experts were called in, and various theories as to the platter’s origins were given. Some believed it came from the first Temple of Solomon, others that it had been among the objects melted down to create the Golden Calf, then later restored to its original form. Some claimed the design was Greek, others Macedonian or Phrygian. Since these cultures had traded with one another over thousands of years, the only consensus was that the platter was ancient, and of Eastern origin. It was to be put on public display at the Hohensalzburg castle throughout the month of January 1900 before being carried off to the royal treasury house at Vienna.

Hieronymus Behn, now nearly forty, had spent the past twenty years seeking the woman who’d stolen his inheritance and blighted his very existence. But the moment he saw reports in the Dutch press describing the Salzburg platter, he was sure he knew how to find her. One of the few rare scrolls his father had managed to appropriate from Clio was still in Hieronymus’s possession, along with the only copy of the extensive research Clio herself had done on the document. If he wasn’t mistaken, this scroll pertained directly to the recently surfaced Salzburg platter.

He took the train from Amsterdam to Salzburg, arriving a day before the exhibition was to open. He went on foot from the station to the castle, and contacted the curator at once. It wasn’t the platter he was interested in, but he
did
want the woman who would surely travel to Salzburg to see it, if only Hieronymus could quickly and effectively plant the right bait.

After handing over the rare scroll to the curator, Hieronymus provided him with Clio’s papers—claiming they were those of his late father, Erasmus Behn, a noted patron of Schliemann. Hieronymus readily agreed to the museum’s request to stipulate that these documents hadn’t yet been authenticated, asking only that at least their general contents—and the name of their donor, his late father—be made public at the opening of the show. Having studied the research notes in depth himself, Hieronymus knew that when they surfaced, the attention they drew would also draw his stepmother like a magnet.

In the scroll, which Clio and her father had found in an ancient clay jar in the Holy Land, the platter was said to have once been a decoration on a shield in ancient Greek times, and later to have been part of the hoard of Herod the Great. It was stored in the reign of Herod’s son Herod Antipas at the palace of Machareus, at the time John the Baptist was incarcerated there and beheaded. Antipas later brought the platter to Rome, where it passed through the hands of three emperors: Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

Clio’s subsequent researches into this object indicated that Nero, believing the platter to possess unusual occult properties, had it removed from Rome to Subiaco and placed in a famous oracular cave just across the valley, facing his summer palace there. After Nero’s premature death by assassination, the platter stayed in the cave untouched for nearly five hundred years. This very cave at Subiaco became in
A.D
. 500 the site of Saint Benedict’s famous hermetic retreat. According to Clio, once the platter surfaced it passed into the hands of the Benedictine Order, the Black Monks, where its powers as a holy relic enabled them to proselytize the Germanic lands successfully and to become the most powerful monastic force in continental Europe.

The first meeting between Hieronymus Behn and his long-absent stepmother, Clio, was not what either might have imagined. She, still a beauty at fifty-five, and he, a dazzlingly handsome blond Netherlander of not quite forty, made a striking couple. But Hieronymus quickly learned that, much as he wanted to repair past injustices to himself, so did Clio. Injustices to
herself
.

Clio explained that she had returned to the utopian community by summer’s end as promised, but she’d learned that the community had been broken up for want of funds and that her husband had taken the children and returned to Holland. After the war, she’d contacted the Netherlands government and received notice that her family, missing in the war zone, were all presumed dead.

For the thirty years that Hieronymus had spent resenting Clio and planning to exact restitution and retribution, she’d been living in Switzerland among the Gypsies, as before, imagining the Behns all long dead. She’d even recently adopted a young girl to replace her only child, and planned to begin soon to train her in the same languages and research techniques that Clio herself, under the tutelage of her father, had also acquired at an early age.

When she learned that her natural daughter was indeed alive but had been put in a foundling home thirty years ago—and that Hieronymus Behn had done essentially nothing to find his sister in all that time—Clio understood that this man before her, as handsome and dashing as his late father, was also as cold-blooded and self-involved. Clio proposed an arrangement between them that required a compromise.

Since Hieronymus himself was no blood relation of hers, she owed him nothing, she said. But if he would use his connections in the Calvinist Church to discover the foundling home where his sister had been sent, then trace her and find her and bring her to Switzerland so her mother could see her at last, Clio would settle a handsome sum from her own large estate on each of them. To this, Hieronymus swiftly agreed. But he was hardly expecting what would happen next.

As Wolfgang and I sat there in a silence so tense you could cut it, Zoe continued, “The long-lost half sister my father was sent in search of, a half sister he eventually found to the great misfortune of each, was the woman who would soon become his wife—Hermione.”

Wolfgang was regarding Zoe with an expression I couldn’t fathom. Then his eyes narrowed. “You mean to say, your parents—”

“Were half brother and sister,” Zoe finished for him. “But I’m not through.”

“I’ve heard enough,” I said abruptly.

So this was the reason everyone had kept our family relationships under wraps all these years. I truly thought I was going to be ill. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to escape from the room. But Zoe was having none of it.

“These manuscripts were given into your possession,” she said. “But you’ll be able neither to protect them nor make use of them unless you know everything.”

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Wolfgang pick up his wineglass and throw down a healthy slug. He’d been awfully quiet and noncommittal throughout all this. I wondered how he was taking it. After all, Zoe was his grandmother, too. I prayed to God this was the last little surprise coming. What could be worse?

“Through his connections with the Calvinist Church,” said Zoe, “Hieronymus located the foundling home and learned that his half sister Hermione, at the age of sixteen, had been sent to South Africa with a boatload of other girls as Boer mail-order brides. The war was over, so he took a boat to the Cape to find her.” Watching me closely, she added, “Christian Alexander had just died of complications of a war wound. Hermione inherited his fortune, including vast mining and mineral concessions, but she was also pregnant with a second child. She was beside herself with grief and fear about her future, a widow alone with two children in a war-torn country. When the stunningly handsome Hieronymus Behn arrived, claiming he was her cousin—”

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?”