The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

want the woman who would surely travel to Salzburg to see it, if only Hieronymus could quickly and effectively plant the right bait.

After handing over the rare scroll to the curator, Hieronymus provided him with Clio’s papers—claiming they were those of his late father, Erasmus Behn, a noted patron of Schliemann. Hieronymus readily agreed to the museum’s request to stipulate that these documents hadn’t yet been authenticated, asking only that at least their general contents—and the name of their donor, his late father—be made public at the opening of the show. Having studied the research notes in depth himself, Hieronymus knew that when they surfaced, the attention they drew would also draw his stepmother like a magnet.

In the scroll, which Clio and her father had found in an ancient clay jar in the Holy Land, the platter was said to have once been a decoration on a shield in ancient Greek times, and later to have been part of the hoard of Herod the Great. It was stored in the reign of Herod’s son Herod Antipas at the palace of Machareus, at the time John the Baptist was incarcerated there and beheaded. Antipas later brought the platter to Rome, where it passed through the hands of three emperors: Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

Clio’s subsequent researches into this object indicated that Nero, believing the platter to possess unusual occult properties, had it removed from Rome to Subiaco and placed in a famous oracular cave just across the valley, facing his summer palace there. After Nero’s premature death by assassination, the platter stayed in the cave untouched for nearly five hundred years. This very cave at Subiaco became in A.D. 500 the site of Saint Benedict’s famous hermetic retreat. According to Clio, once the platter surfaced it passed into the hands of the Benedictine Order, the Black Monks, where its powers as a holy relic enabled them to proselytize the Germanic lands successfully and to become the most powerful monastic force in continental Europe.

The first meeting between Hieronymus Behn and his long-absent stepmother, Clio, was not what either might have imagined. She, still a beauty at fifty-five, and he, a dazzlingly handsome blond Netherlander of not quite forty, made a striking couple. But Hieronymus quickly learned that, much as he wanted to repair past injustices to himself, so did Clio. Injustices to herself.

Clio explained that she had returned to the utopian community by summer’s end as promised, but she’d learned that the community had been broken up for want of funds and that her husband had taken the children and returned to Holland. After the war, she’d contacted the Netherlands government and received notice that her family, missing in the war zone, were all presumed dead.

For the thirty years that Hieronymus had spent resenting Clio and planning to exact restitution and retribution, she’d been living in Switzerland among the Gypsies, as before, imagining the Behns all long dead. She’d even recently adopted a young girl to replace her only child, and planned to begin soon to train her in the same languages and research techniques that Clio herself, under the tutelage of her father, had also acquired at an early age.

When she learned that her natural daughter was indeed alive but had been put in a foundling home thirty years ago—and that Hieronymus Behn had done essentially nothing to find his sister in all that time—Clio understood that this man before her, as handsome and dashing as his late father, was also as cold-blooded and self-involved. Clio proposed an arrangement between them that required a compromise.

Since Hieronymus himself was no blood relation of hers, she owed him nothing, she said. But if he would use his connections in the Calvinist Church to discover the foundling home where his sister had been sent, then trace her and find her and bring her to Switzerland so her mother could see her at last, Clio would settle a handsome sum from her own large estate on each of them. To this, Hieronymus swiftly agreed. But he was hardly expecting what would happen next.

As Wolfgang and I sat there in a silence so tense you could cut it, Zoe continued, “The long-lost half sister my father was sent in search of, a half sister he eventually found to the great misfortune of each, was the woman who would soon become his wife—Hermione.”

Wolfgang was regarding Zoe with an expression I couldn’t fathom. Then his eyes narrowed. “You mean to say, your parents—”

“Were half brother and sister,” Zoe finished for him. “But I’m not through.”

“I’ve heard enough,” I said abruptly.

So this was the reason everyone had kept our family relationships under wraps all these years. I truly thought I was going to be ill. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to escape from the room. But Zoe was having none of it.

“These manuscripts were given into your possession,” she said. “But you’ll be able neither to protect them nor make use of them unless you know everything.”

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Wolfgang pick up his wineglass and throw down a healthy slug. He’d been awfully quiet and noncommittal throughout all this. I wondered how he was taking it. After all, Zoe was his grandmother, too. I prayed to God this was the last little surprise coming. What could be worse?

“Through his connections with the Calvinist Church,” said Zoe, “Hieronymus located the foundling home and learned that his half sister Hermione, at the age of sixteen, had been sent to South Africa with a boatload of other girls as Boer mail-order brides. The war was over, so he took a boat to the Cape to find her.” Watching me closely, she added, “Christian Alexander had just died of complications of a war wound. Hermione inherited his fortune, including vast mining and mineral concessions, but she was also pregnant with a second child. She was beside herself with grief and fear about her future, a widow alone with two children in a war-torn country. When the stunningly handsome