The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

your work. He made a reasonable assumption. But we will come to that. To answer your question, Pandora was indeed my lover and the mother of my son and only child, but she was not my cousin at all. She was my wife. Those pictures in your hand were taken on our wedding day.”

“You were married to Pandora?” I said, dumbfounded. “But when?”

“As you see, in that photo she might have been eighteen or twenty years of age,” he said. “But in fact she was thirteen, and I sixteen, the day we were married. It was different then, you know: girls of tender years were already women, and early marriages are anyway quite customary among the Rom. At the age of thirteen Pandora was a woman, I assure you. Then when I was twenty and she seventeen, she left, and our son Augustus was born inside the house of Hieronymus Behn.”

My brain was swarming with a million questions, but just then the waiter arrived with the chocolate dessert named for the Gypsy violinist, a bowl of Schlagobers, and a bottle of grappa, that heady Italian liqueur made from the fermented seeds of grape, which is twice as strong as cognac. When the waiter left, I waved my hand to indicate I didn’t want anything further to drink—I was almost hyperventilating as it was. Dacian filled my glass anyway, then he picked up his own glass and touched it to mine.

“Take it. You may find that you need it before I’ve finished,” he said.

“You haven’t finished?” I hissed under my breath, though when I glanced around, I saw that we were the only diners still left in this part of the restaurant and the waiters, with towels folded over their arms, were at a discreet distance across the room chatting among themselves.

After all that business of beliefs clashing with reality, I suddenly knew what I believed: Of everything I’d thought I didn’t want to hear up until now, this was likely to be the worst. I prayed reality would prove me wrong, but I didn’t have much faith. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Dacian Bassarides was seated beside me, blocking my exit from the booth. He rested one hand on my shoulder, and again I felt the energy of the man. He was so close I could inhale his perfumed warmth, like the scent of sage and bonfires, like the moist aroma of deep pine forests where the divine panther moved.

“Ariel, I know what I’ve said has shocked and perhaps even frightened you, but that was only part of what I came here from France to reveal,” he said gravely. He took the locket from my hand, closed it carefully, and replaced it in his vest pocket. “It’s imperative that you hear everything I have to say, however unpleasant. To close one’s eyes and ears at this moment is a dangerous decision for any of us to take—most especially for you.”

“I can’t ‘take’ any decisions at all,” I said bitterly. “I don’t think I can ‘take’ any more of anything.”

“Oh yes, you can,” he said. “You are Pandora’s only grandchild, and mine too. Whether you know it or not, you were born, as one might say, to have a rendezvous with destiny; your journey toward it has already begun. But my people make a distinction between destiny and fate. We don’t think we are born with a ‘fate’ that impels us to act out some script composed by a higher hand, but rather that each of us has a destiny, a preexisting pattern which, in our hearts, we wish one day to fulfill. However, in order to pour yourself into this new form—this higher vessel, as it were—you must recognize it is your destiny and seek it accordingly—just as a swan that’s been raised among chickens must realize his own destiny is in learning to swim and to fly, or he will remain nothing but an earthbound fowl, scratching in the dust all his days.”

Somehow, this comparison made me improbably angry. How could he even suggest that anything in our “swanlike” blood might call for a “higher vessel”? I helped myself to a healthy slug of the grappa and turned to him.

“Look,” I said in frustration, “maybe it was my ‘destiny’ to be Pandora’s only granddaughter, maybe it was my ‘destiny’ to look so much like her. And maybe it’s true that I was born just after she died. But that doesn’t make me some kind of reincarnation or clone of her—or mean that her destiny is in any way related to mine. There’s no ‘form’ or ‘pattern’ or anything inside of me that would cause me to do even one of the terrible, cruel things it seems she did to you, and to everybody else she came into contact with.”

Dacian looked at me with widened eyes for a moment. Then he burst into a kind of cold laughter.

“This is what I meant by not believing all you hear, and again the result of not putting questions properly,” he said. When I said nothing, he added, “You must understand that we were none of us pawns. Not Hieronymus Behn nor I. Not Pandora, Lafcadio, Earnest, or Zoe. Like you, we had choices. But a choice is a decision, and decisions lead to events. Once an event takes place it’s too late to turn back the clock and change it. But it is never too late to examine the lessons of history.”

“I’ve avoided examining my family’s history all my life,” I told him. “If I’ve been successful at it for so long, why start now?”

“Perhaps because ignorance is not success,” Dacian said.

Wasn’t that my song he was playing? I spread my hands, showing my willingness to proceed.

“Just before we married,” Dacian began, “Pandora and I learned to our horror that something of great value belonging to her family, something of vast importance, had by deceit come into the possession of a man named Hieronymus Behn. Pandora