Magic Flutes

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They were both born under the sign of Gemini, and for those who believe in the stars as arbiters of fate this must have seemed the link that bound them. She herself was to invoke the heavens when at last they met. ‘Could I be your Star Sister?’ she was to ask him, ‘Could I at least be that?’

Certainly it would seem to need the magic of star lore to link the life of the tiny, dark-eyed Austrian princess — born in a famous castle and burdened, in the presence of the Emperor Franz Joseph, with a dozen sonorous Christian names — with that of the abandoned, grey-blanketed bundle found on the quayside of a grim, industrial English town: a bundle opened to reveal a day-old, naked, furiously screaming baby boy.

Her birth thus was chronicled, documented and celebrated with fanfares (though she should have been a boy). But his…

It was the merest chance that he was found at all, for the bundle was half concealed by sacking and the Tyne docks that mid-morning in 1891 were high-piled with packing cases waiting to be loaded on the boats for Scandinavia, with rusty barrels, coils of rope and coal from the barges. But among the shawled and clogged women on their way to work on the Fish Quay there was one who had sharp ears and detected above the screeching of the gulls another, more frantic and urgent cry.

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