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

he must have been the go-between sent by Pandora and my mother to find me in Salzburg.

“Your mother does have a ‘last wish’ for you, Lafcadio,” Pandora said as she lifted little Zoe up onto the revolving carousel platform. “Once she learned from us of your gift, she prayed that you should become a great violinist—even the greatest in the world. To that end, she’s kept a private fund, set aside for you by your godfather, Mr. Rhodes, a fund your stepfather knows nothing about—not a huge sum, but ample to pay for your musical education when you are ready. In these next few years, Dacian has agreed to help you prepare for the conservatory. If your stepfather stops your schooling, we’ll find you a place to live. Is this plan of your mother’s at all to your liking?”

A plan to my liking? In one day, my world had turned inside out—from a future that resembled a prison camp with my stepfather as jailer, to a sweet-scented bed of rose and narcissus where all my fantasies would soon be fulfilled.

It seemed only moments, though it must have been an hour or more, that we whirled on the snowy carousel. Dacian played snatches on the violin with cold fingers—there was no steam, he explained, to run the calliope—and Pandora hummed the counterpoint through her muffler from which steamy breath emerged. Zoe danced and pranced about the circle as it whirled, and Earnest and I rode up and down proudly on our chosen steeds, a wolf for me and a soaring eagle for him. In between, my siblings spoke to me in whispers of what the future might be like without our mother—an interesting proposition from my viewpoint, since it described my entire past.

As to what Pandora’s role was in it all, or why she’d chosen our family on whom to bestow her fairy magic, this still remained a mystery. I felt so euphoric at the thought of realizing my true dream that it never occurred to me it might be years before I learned the answers to such critical questions.

My first family outing was now disrupted by a new arrival, who approached down the allée in the opposite direction to the one we’d come.

“Goodness, it’s Lucky,” Pandora said, pulling down her muffler and taking her cousin’s arm. “But how did he find us here?”

I didn’t find this intrusion on my fantasies to be in any respect lucky. Perhaps he’d come to collect us and take us home. From my perch on my wolf I studied him as he came.

He was slender, with a long, pale, clean-shaven face, and older than Pandora—perhaps even twenty or more. He wore a threadbare but well-pressed suit with an artist’s long fringed scarf, yet he had no topcoat in such weather! His mop of silky brown hair was cut in the popular “romantic” fashion, so he had to toss it back from time to time. He slapped his gloved hands against his chest for warmth, his breath streaming behind him. When he came close enough, I could see eyes of such startling blue intensity, it was hard to pull one’s gaze away.

He called to Pandora, “I’ve been searching for you long enough to become a block of ice in this weather, Fräulein.”

Zoe piped up, “Please, please, Lucky—come up here on the carousel and dance with me.” So I now understood that Lucky was the fellow’s name.

He regarded Zoe with mock derision. “Real men don’t dance, Liebchen,” he told her. “Besides, I’ve something of importance I must show you all. We have to see it today. The Hofburg museum will close up for cleaning and repairs next week, and these Viennese are so gemütlich, who knows when it will reopen? I’ll be long gone by then. But I’ve got today’s tickets for the Hofburg already for all of us, yes?”

“I’m sorry you’ve come out in the cold like this, Lucky,” Pandora said. “But I promised Frau Behn I’d show her son around Vienna today. He must be returning to school quite soon.”

“So this lad is the other Behn son—the English one, part Boer?” said Lucky.

Though I didn’t correct him about my Boer-ness, I wondered how such a lower-class person who didn’t possess an overcoat, or even a peacoat like Dacian’s, could possibly be acquainted with my family here in Vienna.

“Lucky was the roommate of Gustl, Lafcadio,” Pandora explained. “Gustl is the musician I told you about, the one who introduced your mother and me. They’ve known each other from high school, and have even written an opera together.”

“But I haven’t seen Gustl in ages,” Lucky told her with a smile. Swinging himself up onto the carousel as it whirled, he made his way around to my wolf and added almost privately, as if we two shared a secret: “Our paths are so different. Gustl has diverged toward the mundane, I toward the divine.”

Now that Lucky was so close, I saw his eyes really were extraordinary. I found myself nearly hypnotized. He studied me as if his appraisal would decide my total life worth, nodding to himself as if well satisfied, which made me strangely happy for some reason. Then he turned to Pandora, taking her hands in his and raising her fingertips to his lips. But he kissed the backs of his own hands instead—an odd, uniquely Austrian custom I’d sometimes seen in Salzburg.

“I don’t write librettos anymore,” he went on. “I’ve been working on paintings again; my watercolors have achieved some success. While I was engaged last Michaelmas for a small job of touching up gold leaf in the Rubens gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one night I went across the street to the Hofburg just before closing. And that’s when I found this thing of enormous interest. I’ve been studying it intensely each night at the library ever since. I’ve been up the river to Krems, also to the monastery of Melk, using their library too, one with quite interesting manuscripts—and even once to Salzburg