Evangeline squeezed the necklace in her hand until the sharp point of the lyre drove deep into the
skin of her palm. She knew she must hurry—she was needed in the library, and the sisters might
wonder where she had gone—and so she let thoughts of her parents recede and focused upon the task
at hand.
Bending to the floor, she slid her fingers over the rough brickwork of the turret wall until she felt
the slightest movement in the third row from the floor. Inserting the flat of a fingernail into a groove,
she levered the loose brick and pulled it from the wall. From the space Evangeline removed a narrow
steel box. The very act of touching the cold metal relieved her mind, as if its solidity contradicted the
insubstantial quality of memory.
Evangeline set the box before her and lifted the top. Inside was a small diary bound with a leather
strap and fastened with a golden clasp molded in the shape of an angel, its body long and thin. A blue
sapphire marked the angel’s eye, and the wings, when pressed, released the latch so that the pages fell
open upon her lap. The leather was worn and scuffed and the binding flexible. On the first page, the
word ANGELOLOGY had been stamped in gold. As she flipped through the pages, Evangeline’s eye
skimmed over hand-drawn maps, notes scribbled in colored inks, sketches of angels and musical
instruments drawn in the margins. A musical score filled a page at the center of the notebook.
Historical analysis and biblical lore filled many pages, and in the last quarter of the notebook there
grew a mass of numbers and calculations that Evangeline did not understand. The diary had belonged
to her grandmother. Now it belonged to Evangeline. She ran her hand over the leather cover, wishing
she could understand the secrets inside.
Evangeline withdrew a photograph tucked in the back of the diary, a snapshot of her mother and
grandmother, arms wrapped around each other. The picture had been taken the year of Evangeline’s
birth—she had compared the date stamped upon the border of the photograph with her own birthday
and had come to the conclusion that her mother had been three months pregnant at the time, although
her condition wasn’t at all apparent. Evangeline gazed upon it, her heart aching. Angela and Gabriella
were happy in the photo. She would give anything, trade everything she had, to be with them again.
Evangeline took care to return to the library with a cheerful expression, hiding her thoughts as best
she could. The fire had gone out, and a draft of cold air swept from the stone fireplace at the center of
the room and tickled the edges of her skirt. She retrieved a black cardigan from her worktable and
wrapped it about her shoulders before going to the center of the rectangular library to investigate. The
fireplace was well used in the long, cold winter months, and one of the sisters must have left the flue
open. Rather than close the flue, Evangeline opened it fully. She took a piece of the knotty pine
stacked in the log rack, placed it in the middle of an iron grating, and lit kindling paper around it.
Clasping the brass handles of the bellows, she blew a few subtle gusts of air until the fire,
encouraged, caught.
Evangeline had spent very little time studying the angelic texts that had brought St. Rose Convent
such renown in theological circles. Some of these texts, such as histories of angelic representation in
art and works of serious angelology, including modern copies of medieval angelological schema and
studies of Thomas Aquinas’s and St. Augustine’s views on the role of the angels in the universe, had
been in the collection from the 1809 founding. A number of studies on angelmorphism could also be
found among the stacks, although these were quite academic and did not catch the interest of many of
the sisters, especially the younger generation, who (truth be told) did not spend much time on angels
at all. The softer side of angelology was also represented, despite the cold eye the community cast
upon the New Agers: There were books on the various cults of angel veneration in the ancient and
modern world as well as the phenomenon of guardian angels. There were also a number of art books
filled with plates, including an exceptional volume of Edward Burne-Jones’s angels that Evangeline
loved in particular.
On the opposite wall from the fireplace there stood a rostrum for the library ledger. Here the
sisters wrote the titles of books they removed from the stacks, taking as many as they wished to their
cells and returning them at will. It was a haphazard system that somehow worked perfectly well, with
the same intuitive matriarchal organization that marked the convent. It was not always thus. In the
nineteenth century—before the ledger—books had come and gone without systemization, piling up on