The Magician's Lie Read Online Free

him out of her half-brown eye, tilts her head, and asks, “Where does a person’s story begin?”

Chapter Two
    1892
    A Night’s Alteration
    Where does a person’s story begin? Mine starts with a hole in the middle, a hole where a father should have been. I must have had one, but the truth was that no one wanted to say out loud who he had been, if they even knew. I was raised in my grandparents’ house in Philadelphia. My name was Ada Bates. There was plenty of room and plenty of money, and I grew up straight and strong.
    In my earliest memories, I remember my mother as a cello. She and her instrument fused: a deep voice, a wasp waist. She wielded her bow fiercely, the notes soaring high and plunging low until the very windows trembled in their sills. I heard her at a distance, practicing at all hours, from down long hallways and behind closed doors. As she and my father were never married, she must have been in disgrace, but she never seemed to feel it. She was always cheerful as a songbird in those days.
    She taught me music herself, though I was at best a middling student. From her, I had inherited milk-white skin, large eyes, and a cleft in my chin, but the other side of the family delivered a tin ear. My singing was perpetually flat and my piano clumsy. I still looked forward to the lessons, because I rarely heard or saw her otherwise. Once a month, we both had our hair dyed from its natural red-gold to a more sedate brown, a tradition my grandmother had started when my mother herself was a child. I looked forward to those days, when we sat side by side for more than an hour, but they were all too rare. The rest of the time, a freckled governess named Colleen woke me, managed my days, and bid me good night, and I took my daily meals with her instead of in the dining room with my mother and grandparents. Except for music, my education was conducted by a series of tutors: French, history, grammar, drawing. All my tutors were so alike in demeanor—pale, cool, severe—that I believed when I was very young that they were all brothers and sisters from the same family. When not engaged in lessons, I was nearly always reading, my bookcases filled with Shakespeare and Seneca, Emerson and Donne. Reading was learning, and learning was a matter best conducted in privacy. My grandmother never trusted the schools.
    As it turned out, my grandmother would have done well to be even more distrustful.
    In 1892, when I was twelve years old, my grandparents arranged what was to be the greatest opportunity of my mother’s life. At considerable expense and trouble, they secured passage for her to travel to Europe for an audience with Franco Faccio of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, for whom she was to perform. If she impressed him, she might have a place with the orchestra as a first chair and soloist, appearing before large audiences to great acclaim.
    And she might have amazed Signore Faccio with her skill at the cello, and she might have been a great star, except that she sold the tickets and traded away her best jewelry and gave the money instead to a man named Victor Turner, who had been her music teacher for several years and would later be a frustrated farmhand, my stepfather, and the love of my mother’s life. The day that she would have left for Europe became, instead, the day they ran away.
    And that day, they took me with them. Heaven knows why. Someone else could have stood witness at their wedding, which was the only service I seemed to perform on the journey. I stayed silent and didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want them to think better of the choice.
    Our destination was Jeansville, Tennessee, where Victor’s brother Silas owned a small farm outside the town, growing hay and breeding horses. Victor was a versatile teacher, a master of everything from singing to piano to woodwinds and brass, and his plan had been to teach music to the families of the town. It took only two weeks for