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

crew to raise the ramp again, but their voices were drowned out by the mob. Hermione closed her eyes and prayed.

Then pandemonium broke loose. The drunken, unruly Boers swarmed onto the ship. Screaming girls were plucked from their feet and tossed over burly shoulders like sacks of flour. A child clinging to Hermione was torn from her and vanished silently into the roaring swirl of bodies. Hermione herself was desperately pressing toward the railing, thinking she still might act upon her earlier thought of wedding herself to the sea instead of to one of these reeking, brutal men.

Just then, from behind, two arms pinned her own arms to her sides and she was swept off her feet. She tried kicking and biting, but her unseen assailant shoved through the mob, tightening his grasp, and screaming profanities in her ear. She became lightheaded as she was carried down the ramp toward the muddy streets of the port, and began slipping from consciousness. Then something smashed into her assailant and she was hurled to the ground. Freed from her captor, she clawed at the mud and crawled to her feet to run away—though she’d no idea where—when she felt a hand grasp hers. It was a firm, cool hand with a confident grip, unlike the rough paws that had dug into her. For some reason, instead of yanking herself away and making that dash to freedom, she stopped and looked at the owner of the hand holding hers.

His eyes were the same color of pale blue as her own, and they crinkled at the corners when he smiled down at her with the sort of smile she’d never seen: a smile of possession, almost of ownership. He brushed a lock of hair from her face—an intimate gesture, as if they were alone, as if they’d known one another for years.

“Come with me,” he said.

That was all. She followed him without a single question, stepping daintily over the prostrate body of her assailant. The stranger lifted her onto his waiting horse and climbed up just behind, holding her close.

“I am Christian Alexander, Lord Stirling,” he said in her ear. “And I’ve been waiting for you, my dear, for a very, very long time.”

It was fortunate for my mother, Hermione, that she was one of the most astonishing beauties of her day. That silvery blondness served her well in her debut on the shores of Africa. My father, however, was nothing like the lofty lord he pretended to be—though few at the time, including my mother, knew so.

Christian Alexander was the fifth son of a minor yeoman from Hertfordshire, and stood to inherit absolutely nothing. But as a young man, he did go up to Oriel at Oxford along with a childhood friend of his, the son of a clergyman. And when the friend went off to Africa each year for his health, my father had both the opportunity and the foresight to follow him. Eventually, my father would become his most trusted business partner. The name of the childhood friend was Cecil John Rhodes.

Cecil Rhodes had been seriously ill when young, so ill that during his second trip to Africa he believed he had fewer than six months to live. But working and often even living outdoors in that warm dry air restored him to health a bit more with each passing year. It was during their very first trip, however, in the late spring of 1870, when both boys were seventeen, that diamonds were discovered at the De Beers farms, while they were working on the land. Then Cecil Rhodes had a vision.

Much as Paul Kruger believed in the Divine Providence of the Boers, so Cecil Rhodes came to believe in the Manifest Destiny of the British in Africa. Rhodes wanted the diamond fields consolidated under one company, a British company. He wanted a British railroad built “from Cape to Cairo” to join Britain’s African states. Later, when South Africa’s vast reserves of gold were discovered, he would claim those for the British Empire, too. In the interim Rhodes became powerful and my father—thanks completely to their friendship—became rich.

In the year 1884, when sixteen-year-old Hermione arrived from Holland, my father was thirty-two and had been a millionaire in diamonds for more than a decade. By the date of my birth, in December of 1900, my mother herself was thirty-two. And, thanks to the Boer War, my father was dead.

Everyone had believed that the war was over when the sieges of Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley were lifted. The Transvaal was annexed by the British and Paul Kruger fled to Holland, barely two months before my birth. Many British packed up then and went home. But the guerrillas fought on in the mountains for more than another year; the English rounded up women and children from the rebellious Boer colonies and incarcerated them for the duration in the first concentration camps. My father died of complications of a wound incurred at Kimberley, as Rhodes was to die two years later, his health broken by the same siege. Kruger would be dead in Holland a mere two years after that. It was the end of an era.

But as with every end, it was also a new beginning. This one marked the beginning of terrorist and guerilla warfare, concentration camps, and the practice of genocide: the dawn of a bright new age for which we have largely the Boers to thank, though the English swiftly caught up, with many dire contributions of their own.

When my father died, Cecil Rhodes settled a huge estate in cash and ancillary mineral rights upon my mother, in exchange for my father’s shares and interest from building the De Beers diamond concession. And he gave yet another generous amount from his own vast wealth toward my upbringing and education, in thanks for my father having given his life in the service of a British-controlled South Africa.

In settling all this on the bereaved widow Hermione Alexander; Mr. Rhodes did not think