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

whose problems were about as pressing as trying to decide what piece of music to fiddle while Rome burned, or under what social circumstances it was appropriate for a gentleman to keep his trousers on. This change in tone revised that impression.

Olivier and Bambi too, I noticed, were staring at him and barely touching their food. Laf had picked up the cheesecloth-wrapped lemon from his plate and stabbed it with his fork, squeezing some extra juice into his béarnaise sauce. But his eyes were focused on the snow that was just beginning to trickle down from the skies outside beyond the picture windows.

“It’s hard to understand the depth and bitterness of such feelings, Gavroche,” said Laf, “until you know the history of the strange country of my birth. I say strange, for it began not as a country but as a business enterprise—a company. It was known as the Company, and this company created from the start a private, completely separate world of its own, upon a dark and little-known continent. It created an isolation as impenetrable as the one created by the thorny hedge of bitter almond, which itself grew into the very symbol of the Boers and their desire to live apart from all the rest of the world.…”

THE HEDGE OF BITTER ALMOND

For hundreds of years, since the Dutch East India Company had first set up garrisons along the Cape of Good Hope, many Boers engaged in animal husbandry, keeping flocks of sheep and cattle, an occupation that made them more mobile than farmers who worked the soil. If they chafed under the greedy and tyrannical whims of the Company, they would simply pull up roots and trek to greener pastures—as it soon became their preference to do, no matter who else might already be occupying the new lands they coveted. Nor did they intend to share.

Within less than a century, these trekboers had taken most lands formerly inhabited by the Hottentots, enslaved them and their children, and tracked down the Bushmen like wild prey, hunting them nearly into extinction. When the Boers did settle in a place for long enough, believing themselves a superior race chosen by Divine Providence, it became their practice to wall themselves into compounds hedged with sharp-thorned thickets of the bitter almond tree—the first clear symbol of apartheid—designed to prevent the natives both from poaching and from intermingling.

Thus the story might have continued. But in 1795 the British captured the Cape. At the request of the exiled Prince of Orange (Holland itself having fallen to the French revolutionary government), Britain purchased Cape Colony from the Dutch for six million pounds. The resident Boer colonists were never consulted in this matter; it would scarcely have been customary in that day. But it rankled them nonetheless, for they were now to be treated as an actual colony, and subject to law and order quite inconsistent with their former way of life.

Then too, more colonists began arriving from Britain: planters and settlers with their wives and children, and the missionaries who went into the bush to minister to the natives. The missionaries were quick to protest, and report back to England, the treatment they observed of local tribes. After fewer than forty years of British rule, in December of 1834, the Slave Emancipation Act freed all slaves within the British Empire, including those impounded by the Boers, an action completely unacceptable to them. And so the Great Trek began.

Thousands of Boers participated in this trek across the Orange River, through Natal, and into the wilderness of northern Transvaal, fleeing British rule, claiming all of the Bechuana territory for themselves, fighting the warlike Zulus. These Voortrekkers existed as an armed camp, hovering always at the brink of anarchy but still believing themselves the chosen of God.

The Boers’ faith in their racial superiority was a concept fanned to white-hot flame by the Separatist Reformed—or ‘Dopper’—Church, one of whose most fervent adherents was the young Paulus Kruger who later, as president of Transvaal, would foment the Boer War. The leaders of such Calvinist churches were determined to ensure that Boer hegemony would prevail and endure: forever chosen, forever pure, forever white.

To preserve racial purity, the church itself arranged to loot orphanages back in Holland of young girls with no other prospects for their futures. Boatfuls of these, many little more than children, were shipped to the Cape colonies as brides for unknown Boers in the wilderness of the veldt. Among these, in the late winter of 1884, was a young orphan girl with the name of Hermione, who was to become my mother.

My mother was barely sixteen when she was told she would be sent to the African continent, along with other young girls, to be married off to men whose names they were not even told. Nothing is known of Hermione’s parentage, though she was likely illegitimate. Abandoned in infancy, she grew up in a Calvinist orphanage in Amsterdam, and she prayed often to the Deity for some bizarre accident of fate, some adventure to come her way and break her free of a strict, colorless existence. But it wasn’t her idea that God’s response would mean being hauled halfway around the world and bartered off like livestock. Nor did her Calvinist training inform her precisely what the marriage bond entailed. What she gleaned from the whispers of other girls only increased her fear.

As the young women arrived at the port of Natal—shaken from the stormy passage, ill nourished, and sickened by anxiety at leaving behind what little they had known of reality—they were greeted by a mob of drunken Boer farmers, the intended husbands, who were unwilling to wait until the church elders selected each a specific mate. They had come to grab prizes of their own choosing and haul them home.

On deck, Hermione and the others huddled like frightened animals, gazing down in horror at the sea of screaming faces that pushed toward the lowered gangplank. The ministers aboard cried out for the ship’s