The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  “For two years after my birth, this war had been raging between the more lately-come English settlers and the descendants of earlier Dutch immigrants who called themselves Boers, like the German word Bauer or farmer—those whom we English call simply boors or country bumpkins—”

  “We English, Uncle Laf?” I interrupted in surprise. “But I thought our family was descended from Afrikaners.”

  “Perhaps my stepfather—your grandfather Hieronymus Behn—had the right to claim such boor-ishness,” Laf agreed with a dark smile. “But my true father was English and my mother Dutch. My mixed parentage, and my birth into a country torn by such a war, go far to explain what bitterness I felt toward the bloody Boers. This war was the match touching off a chain of events that would soon engulf the world, and propel our family into the very heart of chaos. I have only to think of those events and I cannot choke down my gall, nor quench my unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred for those men.”

  Holy shit. Unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred? Until this moment, like everyone, I’d regarded Laf as a brilliant violinist but a dilettante nonetheless, 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 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 own
er 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 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 mist
ress 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—”