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

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.

I had never spoken to anyone of my private obsession, which I’d nurtured like a flame through all those lonely days of childhood. Ever since arriving at my school in Salzburg, after my classes each day I would go into the nearby woods and play for hour after hour on a small violin—almost a toy—that I’d been given as a child. Even the masters at my school didn’t know.

But there were limits to what even the most burning desire could accomplish given so inferior an instrument—not to mention that the extent of my instruction had been sneaking to listen outside the doors of the Mozarteum. All this changed one day, nearly a year before, when a darkly handsome young man came walking through the woods playing his own violin—and in strains at once so sweet and yet so transcendental, one forgot there was a violin at all, as if sounds emitted by his soul were merging with the air in a long, passionate embrace. He made love to the wind.

And that same day, the young man I’d just met as Pandora’s cousin Dacian Bassarides—whose name I’d never known till now—had become my master. Several times a week we met in the woods, and with few words he taught me how to play. So