Angelology(126)

drawing connections where none existed, romanticizing his work and blowing the whole thing out of

proportion. Now that he’d settled into his seat on the train and had the peace of mind to think it all

through, Verlaine began to wonder if he hadn’t overreacted a bit to the lyre necklace. Indeed, there

was the chance that the men who had broken into his Renault had nothing to do with Grigori. Perhaps

there was another, completely logical explanation for the bizarre events that had happened that day.

Verlaine took the sheets of blank St. Rose Convent stationery and pressed them over the top of the

architectural drawings. The paper was thick cotton bond, pink, with an elaborately woven heading of

roses and angels executed in a lush Victorian-era style that, to his surprise, Verlaine quite liked,

despite his preference for modernism. He had not said so at the time, but Evangeline had been wrong

that their founding mother had designed the stationery two hundred years before: The invention of a

chemical method for making paper from wood pulp, a technological revolution that bolstered the

postal service and allowed individuals and groups to create individualized stationery, did not occur

until the mid-1850s. The St. Rose stationery was most likely created in the late nineteenth century,

using their founding mother’s artwork for the heading. The practice had in fact become extraordinarily

popular during the Gilded Era. Luminaries like his very own Abigail Rockefeller had put great effort

into making dinner-party menus, calling cards, invitations, and personalized envelopes and stationery,

each with family symbols and crests pressed into the highest-quality paper available. He’d sold a

number of pristine sets of such custom-printed bond at auction over the years.

He had not corrected Evangeline’s error, he realized now, because she’d thrown him off guard. If

she had been an old bulldog of a woman, ill-tempered and overprotective of the archives, he would

have been perfectly prepared to handle her. In his years of begging access to libraries, he’d learned

how to win over librarians, or at least gain their sympathy. But he’d been helpless upon seeing

Evangeline. Evangeline was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was strangely comforting, and—as a

nun—completely off-limits. Perhaps she liked him, just a little. Even as she was about to kick him out

of the convent, he’d felt a strange connection between them. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember

exactly how she’d looked sitting in the bar in Milton. She’d looked—aside from that funky black nun

outfit—like a normal person having a normal night out. He didn’t think he would be able to forget the

way she’d smiled, just slightly, when he touched her hand.

Verlaine let the rocking of the train car lull him into a state of reverie, thoughts of Evangeline

playing through his mind, when a crack against the windowpane jarred him awake. An immense white

hand, its fingers spread apart like the points of a starfish, had pressed against the window. Startled,

Verlaine sat back, trying to examine it from a different angle. Another hand appeared on the glass,

slapping against it as if it might push the thick square of plastic inward, popping it from its frame. A

swift, fibrous, red feather brushed against the window. Verlaine blinked, trying to decide if he had

somehow fallen asleep, if this bizarre show was a dream. But upon looking more closely, he saw

something that chilled his blood: Two immense creatures hovered outside the train, their great red

eyes staring at him with menace, their large wings carrying them along in tandem with the car. He

stared at them in fright, unable to pull his gaze away. Was he going crazy or did these bizarre beings

resemble the thugs he had watched trash his car? To his amazement and consternation, he concluded

that they did.

Verlaine jumped up, grabbed his jacket, and ran to the train’s restroom, a small, windowless

compartment that smelled of chemicals. Breathing deeply, he tried to calm himself down. His clothes

were soaked in sweat, and there was a lightness in his chest that made him feel as though he might

faint. He had felt this way only once, in high school, when he’d drunk too much at his prom.

As the train hit upon the edges of the city, Verlaine tucked the maps and stationery deep into his

pocket. He left the bathroom and walked quickly to the front of the train. There were only a few

passengers to get off the midnight train in Harlem. The stark depopulated midnight station gave him

the eerie sensation, as he stepped onto the platform, that he’d made some kind of mistake, perhaps

missed his stop or, worse, had taken the wrong train entirely. He walked the length of the platform