The Magic Circle (23 page)

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 of several important considerations, to wit: That my mother was not the well-bred, sensible Englishwoman the name Lady Stirling might suggest but a poor Dutch waif raised in a Calvinist orphanage. That her entire subsequent experience of life was to be kept in lavish estate by an older, doting husband. That she was still only thirty-two years of age, and still a great beauty, with only one dependent newly born child (myself). And that she was now one of the richest women in Africa, perhaps in the world—which could only make her the more appealing.

Mr. Rhodes did not think of these things, nor probably did my mother, for hers was not a material or grasping nature. But there would be others, quite soon, who would think of such concerns
for
her. The one who moved quickest, of course, was Hieronymus Behn.

Today it is impossible for those familiar with Hieronymus Behn as industrial magnate and ruthless deal-carver to imagine that in the year just after my birth, 1901, he came into my mother’s life in the guise of a poor Calvinist minister sent by the Church—undercover, even as the war raged on—to console her in her grief and bring her back to the fold of her own people and their faith.

My mother was brought to the fold, it would appear, almost as soon as they got up off their knees from that first prayer session. Not into the safe, protective fold of any church, however, but rather into the waiting arms of Hieronymus Behn. Three months after they met, when I was less than six months old, they were married.

It must be added that, religion aside, Hieronymus Behn’s appeal to a grieving widow was palpable. The tintype photographs taken at that time do not do justice to the man I knew as a child. I used often to try to contrast the pictures of my late father, to his advantage, with those of my new stepfather—but in vain. My father looked out of the frame with pale clear eyes, a handsome mustache, and, whether in military clothes or those of a gentleman, a romantic, swashbuckling air. Hieronymus Behn, by contrast, was what would have been described in those days as a magnificent piece of horseflesh: today we would call him a stud. He was the sort of man who, when he set his eyes upon a woman, seemed to be setting his hands on her instead. I’ve no doubt Hieronymus Behn knew precisely where and how to use those hands: he would use them often and well, reaching into others’ pockets as he amassed his great fortune. How could I know, at the time, that he’d already begun with ours?

When the war was over and I was two years old, Mother gave birth to my brother, Earnest. When Earnest was two and I was four, I was shipped off to a
Kinderheim
—a children’s boarding school—in Austria, a country to which I was told my family would soon relocate. When I was six, I received news there at my school in Salzburg that I now had a new little sister named Zoe.

It was only when I was twelve that I finally got word I would see my family, along with a train ticket to Vienna. It was the first time in nearly eight years that I had seen my mother. I did not know it would also be the last.

I learned that my mother was dying before I saw her.

I was sitting opposite large double doors in the big drafty hall, on a straight-backed chair upholstered in hard leather—and waiting. Beside me, to my left, waited two new acquaintances: my half brother and sister, Earnest and Zoe. The sister, Zoe, was fidgeting in her chair, yanking at her blond corkscrew curls, and trying to pull the carefully arranged ribbons out of her hair.

“Mummy doesn’t
want
me to wear ribbons!” she was complaining. “She’s very sick, and they scratch her face when I kiss her.”

This child’s rather odd personality was hardly that of a six-year-old girl. She was more like a Prussian officer. While the serious Earnest still had an awkward trace of that South African twang I’d lost in eight years at an Austrian boarding school, this little terror spoke in a bossy, patrician High German and possessed the self-containment of Attila the Hun.

“I’m sure your nanny wouldn’t want to displease her mistress by letting your ribbons scratch her,” I replied, trying to appease her so she’d settle down.

Though it seemed inappropriate to say “her mistress,” I found it hard to refer to the woman I knew was lying in a bed just beyond those doors as “Mother.” I wasn’t sure what I would feel when at last I saw her. I scarcely remembered her at all.

Our brother Earnest wasn’t saying much, just sitting there beside Zoe with his hands folded in his lap. His was a pale, almost flawlessly handsome version of the more ruggedly chiseled profile of his father, combined with that glorious ash blond coloring of our mother. I thought him really beautiful, like an angel from a painting—a combination that, in a rough boys’ school like mine, he would not have found an asset.

“She’s dying, you know,” Zoe informed me, pointing with her small hand toward the forbidding double doors across the hall. “This may be the last time any of us will see her—so the
least
they could do is make it so she can kiss me goodbye.”

“Dying?” I said, hearing the word echo in the darkened corridor. I felt something hard and numb forming within my chest. How could my mother be dying? She was so young the last time I’d seen her. And all those pictures of her on my dresser at school: so beautiful and so young. Illness, perhaps. But death was something I was totally unprepared for.

“It’s awful,” said Zoe. “Really
disgusting
. Her brains are spilling out. Not just her brains—there’s something hideous and creepy growing in the dark inside her head. They had to cut a hole in her head bone, so she wouldn’t get squashed—”

“Zoe, stop it,” said Earnest softly. Then he looked sadly at me, his pale grey eyes shadowed by long, thick lashes.

I was in shock. But before I had time to collect myself, the large doors opened and Hieronymus Behn stepped into the corridor. I hadn’t seen him earlier that evening when I’d been collected from the train. I hardly recognized him in the full muttonchop whiskers then in fashion, but underneath, the outline of his handsome, sculptural face remained virile and strong, lacking the soft complacency one often found in the Austrian upper classes. He seemed in complete command of the situation, unmoved by any such horrors as Zoe described that might lie beyond those doors.

“Lafcadio, you may come in now and see your mother,” Hieronymus informed me. But when I tried to stand I found my legs were trembling, and the cold lump moved into my throat, where it stuck like a block of ice.

“I’ll come too,” Zoe announced, on her feet beside me, her small hand thrust into mine. As she marched toward the doors with me in tow, my stepfather remained in our path. His brow furrowed slightly and he seemed about to speak. But just then Earnest stood up and joined us.

“No, we’ll all go in there together, we children,” he said quietly. “I know Father will think that best, since it will tire our mother the very least.”

“Of course,” said Hieronymus after only a heartbeat’s pause, and he stepped aside for all of us children to pass through the high paneled doors.

This was the first time, but it was not to be the last, that I would see the quiet self-possession of Earnest prevail over the clear and strong-willed intentions of Hieronymus Behn. No one else could ever do so.

Despite my late father’s wealth, the grandeur of our plantations in Africa, or the resplendence of the many estates I’d since seen around Salzburg, I had never once in my young life set foot inside a room as grand as the one that lay behind those doors. It was as awesome as the interior of a cathedral: the high ceilings, lavish furniture and accessories and hangings, the rich, jewellike colors of imported stained-glass lamps, the silky, liquid lines of crystal bowls filled with flowers, the mellow sheen of polished pieces of costly Biedermeier.

Zoe had told me, as we’d waited in the hall, that the lower floors of our house had already been converted to that new energy source electricity, which I knew had been installed a decade ago by Thomas Alva Edison himself, at the Schönbrunn Palace right here in Vienna. But my mother’s room was lit by the soft yellow glow of gas lamps, and warmed by a fire that flickered behind the panels of a low glass screen set before the hearth across the room.

I hope never to see such a sight again as that of my mother lying in the enormous canopied bed, her face bleached whiter than the lace counterpane. She weighed next to nothing. She was like a sucked-out husk about to crumble to dust and blow away. The cap covering her head could not conceal that her hair had been shaved—but thank God it hid the rest of the story.

I should never have believed this was my mother. In my childish memory, she was the beautiful woman who’d sung me to sleep with her lovely voice until the age of four. When she turned those watery blue eyes on me now, I wanted to cover my own eyes and to run, sobbing, from the room; I wanted not to think again of my lost childhood, of an abandonment that now could neither be undone nor atoned for.

My stepfather leaned with folded arms against the dark wainscoting beside the entry doors, his cold, immobile eyes focused upon the bed. A small group of servants hovered near the hearth, some silently sobbing or holding each other’s arms, watching as we children crossed the room to our mother’s bedside. God help me, but I only wanted her to vanish as if swallowed by the earth. As if in support, Zoe’s tiny hand squeezed mine, and I heard Earnest’s voice beside me as we reached the bed.

“Lafcadio is here, Mother,” he said. “He would like your blessing.”

Our mother’s lips were moving, and Earnest again helped by lifting little Zoe up onto the bed. He poured out a glass of water and handed it to Zoe, who fed it drop by drop between our mother’s parched lips. She was trying to whisper something, so Zoe took it upon herself to translate. I found it eerie and unnatural to hear what were perhaps the last words of a dying woman emerging from the rosebud lips of a six-year-old child.

“Lafcadio,” my mother said via little Zoe, “I give you my blessing with all my heart. I want you to know I feel the greatest pain that we’ve been parted for so long. Your stepfather thought … we believed it best for your … education.”

Even whispering through Zoe seemed a great effort, and I was frankly praying she’d find herself too weak to go on. Of the many reunions with my mother I’d naturally imagined over the years, none had been like this: a leave-taking before teary onlookers, being barely welcomed at the last possible moment into a family of complete strangers. It was positively ghoulish; I could barely wait for it to end. I was so distraught, I nearly missed the critical words:

“… so your stepfather has generously offered to adopt you, taking responsibility for your well-being and education, as if you were one of his own children. I pray you’ll embrace and care for one another as such. I’ve signed the papers only today. You are now Lafcadio Behn, full brother to Earnest and Zoe.”

Adopted
me? Good lord! How could I become the son of a man I scarcely knew? Was I given no choice in the matter? Was this horrid opportunist, who’d tricked his way into my mother’s bed, now to be in control of my education, my life, my family’s property? Aghast, I suddenly realized that when my mother died, I would no longer
have
any family. A rage struck me, that dark, despairing rage that can perhaps only be so deeply felt by children, who are completely impotent over their own destiny.

I was about to dash from the room in tears when a hand touched me lightly on the shoulder. I expected my stepfather, who’d been behind me only moments before. Instead, there stood the most astonishing creature, regarding me through eyes of a deep, clear green, with mercurial fire burning in their depths—the eyes of a wild animal. Her face, framed by an unbound mane of dark hair, seemed the sort found in paintings of Ondines, creatures arisen from the sparkling magical realms of the sea. She was absolutely ravishing. And despite my youth, I was well prepared to be ravished by her, having forgotten all about Hieronymus Behn, my future, my despair—even my dying mother lying on the bed.

She spoke in a strange foreign-sounding accent, and a voice so musical that it seemed rich with hidden bells. “So this is our little English lord Stirling?” She smiled at me. “I’m Pandora, your mother’s friend and companion.”

Was it only my imagination that she’d stressed the word “mother’s”? She didn’t look old enough to be her companion—perhaps she meant paid companion—but she’d also said friend, hadn’t she? When Hieronymus came forward to address her, Pandora slipped past him as if she hadn’t noticed, and went instead to the bed where my mother lay.