“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.
Plucking little Zoe like a loose pillow from the counterpane, she casually tossed the child over one shoulder. Zoe twisted her head to look at me upside down, and she raised one eyebrow in wise judgment, as if we shared an interesting secret.
“Frau Hermione,” Pandora said to my mother, “if I were a fairy here at your bedside, and I said that you could make three wishes before you died—one wish on behalf of each of your children—what would your wishes be?”
There was whispering amongst the servants—no doubt shocked, as I was, at the cavalier manner in which this new arrival had brushed aside the master of the household and was treating the mistress’s impending death and last wishes almost as a parlor game.
But far more surprising was the change in my mother. Color infused that deathlike pallor, flushing her cheeks with a rosy glow. As she and Pandora locked eyes, a beatific smile lit her face. Though I shall always swear that neither woman spoke a single word, it seemed that a communication passed between them. After a long moment, Mother nodded. When she closed her eyes, she was still smiling.
Pandora, with Zoe swinging from her shoulder like
a fur neckpiece, turned toward the rest of us. “As you children know, it’s bad luck to cast wishes abroad on the winds: it breaks the spell,” she announced. “So I’ll tell each of you in secret your mother’s wish.”
Perhaps Pandora was a fairy or sorceress, as she seemed. She slid Zoe from her shoulder onto the bed and tugged the starchy hair ribbons, shaking her head. “My poor girl, you’ve been trussed and trimmed like a Christmas goose,” she told Zoe. And as if she knew of our earlier conversation outside in the hallway, she pulled the stiff ribbons from Zoe’s hair while whispering Mother’s wish into her ear. Then she said, “Now you can go and give your mother a kiss, and thank her for your wish.”
Zoe scrambled across the bed and did as bidden.
Then Pandora went to Earnest, whispered to him likewise, and the same procedure was followed.
I found it hard to believe that, where I was concerned, there’d be much more to say in the wish department. How could my mother make a wish for me when she’d just admitted that, behind my back, I’d been sold like chattel to Hieronymus Behn, who’d waste no time demolishing my future hopes as thoroughly as he’d done to my present and my past?
Maybe it was my imagination that my stepfather, who was still standing near me, stiffened as Pandora approached us in her rustling grey silk gown. For the first time since she’d entered the room, she not only seemed to take notice of him, she looked him directly in the eye, but with an expression I couldn’t fathom.
Putting her hand on my shoulder again, she leaned to my ear so her cheek brushed mine. I could smell the warm aroma of her skin and I tingled with the same excitement as before. But her next words, spoken with great insistence, made my blood run cold.
“You must show no reaction to anything—you must go along with whatever I say,” she whispered urgently. “We’re all in great danger because of your presence here—you most of all. I cannot explain until I can get you outside this house filled with spies and lies and pain. I will try to arrange this for tomorrow, understood?”
Danger? What sort of danger? I understood nothing, but I nodded my head to show I would make no reaction. Pandora pressed my shoulder firmly and went back to the bed, taking Mother’s hand as she addressed the servants.
“Frau Behn is happy to see her children together at last,” Pandora informed them. “But even so brief a visit has taken her strength. We must leave her to rest now.”
But before the servants had filed out, Pandora called to my stepfather across the room, “Herr Behn, your wife would also like you to have the carriage prepared first thing in the morning, so I may take the children for an outing around Vienna together before Lafcadio returns to his school.”
My stepfather’s eyes flickered for a moment as he stood beside me, halfway between the bed and the door. He seemed to hesitate before bowing his head slightly to her.
“With pleasure,” he said, though it didn’t sound it. He turned and left the room.
It was snowing when we left the house the next morning, but dark skies and inclement weather did little to daunt Zoe, who was excited by being in on some kind of mystery—especially one involving a new brother whom she could instruct and bully. She could barely contain herself long enough to be bundled up by the servants before dragging me off to the stables where we children, I discovered, had our own conveyance: a carriage and four. It was already rigged by instruction of my stepfather, the harnessed horses pawing and the driver waiting high in his box. Nearby stalls held surreys and traps, and the family’s sparkling new motorcar.
I’d tossed sleeplessly all the night, filled with questions about Pandora’s cryptic communiqué.
This morning, in the warmth of the closed cab, as we clopped through the cobbled streets and I got my first good view of Vienna, I saw Earnest turn several times to glance at the rigid back of our driver through the isinglass window separating us. So I held my tongue and waited, becoming more overwrought moment by moment. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine what sort of actual danger—in a rarefied atmosphere like that of the Behn household, surrounded by servants and wealth—could befall a twelve-year-old child.
Pandora interrupted these thoughts. “Have you ever been to an amusement park before?” she asked with a smile. “The Volksprater, or people’s park, used to be the hunting preserve of the emperor Joseph II, the one who was the brother of Marie Antoinette and also a patron of Mozart. Today it has many interesting rides. There’s the carousel: English children call it a merry-go-round because it spins about in a circle. You sit on horses and they go up and down as the wheel turns, so it seems as if you’re riding. This one at the Prater hasn’t got only horses but an entire Tiergarten of animals.”
“Papa doesn’t permit us to go to the Prater,” said Zoe, sounding more than disappointed at this sorry fact.
“He says it’s filled with low-class workers who drink beer and eat sausages,” Earnest explained. “And when I said maybe they wouldn’t go outdoors to such a place in winter, Father said the Prater is closed in the winter—even the giant Ferris wheel.”
“As usual, your father is half right and half wrong,” Pandora said—a cheeky remark for a girl her age to make about a man of my stepfather’s position, whatever the nature of their relationship, which itself was shaping up as a real complexity. “The park may be closed for the winter, but I have special connections that don’t shut down in bad weather.”
By the time we reached the park, the weather had grown bitterly cold. The place did look awfully barren and deserted, completely shut down for the season. There were barriers at the gate that prevented our carriage from passing inside to the area where the big mechanical rides were located. Zoe was crushed.
“It isn’t far,” Pandora told us. “Lafcadio, you carry Zoe on your shoulders through these drifts. It will be easier going once we’re inside the park.”
We had the driver pull the carriage and horses beneath the shelter of a train trestle. Pandora tucked up her heavy skirts, I hefted Zoe onto my shoulders, and we marched through drifts around the barricades and into the silent white arcades of the park. When we reached the broad Hauptallee with its chapel of groomed trees where the paths had been cleared, I set Zoe down.
“Lafcadio, now we can all tell you what we couldn’t say last night,” Earnest said. “You see, Father didn’t want you to come here to Vienna at all; there were awful rows over it. If it weren’t for Pandora, you wouldn’t be here.”
There were rows over me? I looked at Pandora.
“How much do you know of your stepfather?” she asked.
“Practically nothing. I haven’t seen him or my mother in nearly eight years,” I said, with a bitterness I tried to suppress. Although I felt sick at the very idea that I was now the legal son of Hieronymus Behn, I felt awkward saying so before his two blood children walking beside me.
“Zoe and I don’t know Father well ourselves,” Earnest told me, kicking at the snow with his perfectly polished knee boots. “He’s always off at meetings or away on important business. We’re never alone with Mother either: my tutor or Zoe’s nanny or the servants are always about, just like last night.”
“Your mother is little more than a prisoner in her own house,” agreed Pandora. Then, when she saw my expression, she added, “I don’t mean to say she’s been chained up in the attic. But ever since moving here to Vienna eight years ago, she’s never been permitted to be alone. She’s watched by a complement of servants who read her mail. She has neither friends nor visitors, and she never goes outside the house unescorted.”
“But you said you’re her friend,” I pointed out.
I’d probed my mind a thousand times all these years, trying to make sense of my mother’s desertion of me, a desertion the more bitter in that she’d kept her other two children at her side. I’d believed—or longed to believe—that my stepfather was the cause behind it all. Was he really as evil a blackguard as I’d imagined? But Pandora’s revelations had just begun.
�
��After your mother married Hieronymus Behn, twelve years ago,” she said, “he parlayed your father’s fortune, including the mining interests your mother still held, into an international mineral and industrial consortium with holdings so broad they could no longer be managed from provincial Africa but only from a world capital like Vienna. Your stepfather soon learned that in Vienna it was not enough merely to have a rich and beautiful wife whose assets he could exploit with impunity. In order to gain access to the best drawing rooms, impeccable social 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.”
The Magic Circle Page 18
