Evangeline looked at the stack of letters with satisfaction. She would post them that very afternoon.
Suddenly something struck her as odd about Mr. Verlaine’s request. She pulled the letter from the
pocket of her skirt and reread the line stating that Mrs. Rockefeller may have briefly corresponded
with the abbess of St. Rose Convent, Mother Innocenta, in the years 1943—1944.
The dates startled Evangeline. Something momentous had occurred at St. Rose in 1944, something
so important to FSPA lore that it would have proved impossible to overlook its significance.
Evangeline walked through the library, past polished oak tables adorned with small reading lamps to
a black metal fireproof door at the far end of the room. Taking a set of keys from her pocket, she
unlocked the archives. Was it possible, she wondered as she pushed the door open, that the events of
1944 were in some way related to Mr. Verlaine’s request?
Considering the amount of information the archives contained, they were given a miserly allotment
of space in the library. Metal shelves lined the narrow room, storage boxes arranged neatly upon
them. The system was simple and organized: Newspaper clippings were filed in the boxes on the left
side of the room; convent correspondence and personal items such as letters, journals, and artwork of
the dead sisters to the right. Each box had been labeled with a year and placed chronologically on a
shelf. The founding year of St. Rose Convent, 1809, began the procession, and the present year of
1999 ended it.
Evangeline knew the composition of the newspaper articles well, as Sister Philomena had assigned
her the laborious task of encapsulating the delicate newsprint in clear acetate. After so many hours of
trimming and taping and filing the clippings in acid-free cardboard boxes, she felt considerable
chagrin at her inability to locate them immediately.
Evangeline recalled with precise and vivid detail the event that had occurred at the beginning of
1944: In the winter months, a fire had destroyed much of the upper floors of the convent. Evangeline
had encapsulated a yellowed photograph of the convent, its roof eaten away by flames, the snowy
courtyard filled with old-fashioned Seagrave fire engines as hundreds of nuns in serge habits—attire
not altogether different from that still worn by Sisters Bernice and Boniface—stood watching their
home burn.
Evangeline had heard stories of the fire from the Elder Sisters. On that cold February day,
hundreds of shivering nuns stood on the snow-covered grounds watching the convent melt away. A
group of foolhardy sisters went back inside the convent, climbing the east-wing staircase—the only
passageway still free of fire—and threw iron bed frames and desks and as many linens as possible
from the fourth-floor windows, trying, no doubt, to salvage their more precious possessions. The
sisters’ collection of fountain pens, secured in a metal box, was thrown to the courtyard. It cracked
upon hitting the frozen ground, sending inkwells flying like grenades. They had shattered upon impact,
exploding in great bursts of colored splotches on the grounds, red, black, and blue bruises bleeding
into the snow. Soon the courtyard was piled high with debris of twisted bed springs, water-soaked
mattresses, broken desks, and smoke-damaged books.
Within minutes of detection, the fire spread through the main wing of the convent, swept through the
sewing room, devouring bolts of black muslin and white cotton, then moved on to the embroidery
room, where it incinerated the folds of needlework and English lace the sisters had been saving to
sell at the Easter Bazaar, and then finally arrived at the art closets filled with rainbows of tissue
paper twisted into jonquils, daffodils, and hundreds of multicolored roses. The laundry room, an
immense sweatshop inhabited by industrial-size wringers and coal-heated hot irons, was completely
engulfed. Jars of bleach exploded, fueling the fire and sending toxic smoke throughout the lower
floors. Fifty fresh-laundered serge habits disappeared in an instant of heat. By the time the blaze had
burned down to a slow, steamy stream of smoke by late afternoon, St. Rose was a mass of charred
wood and sizzling roof tin.
At last Evangeline came upon three boxes marked 1944. Realizing that news of the fire would have
spilled over into the middle months of 1944, Evangeline pulled down all three, stacked them together,
and carried them out of the archives, bumping the door closed with her hip. She strode back to her
cold, dreary office to examine the contents of the boxes.
According to a detailed article clipped from a Poughkeepsie newspaper, the fire had started from
an undetermined quadrant of the convent’s fourth floor and spread through the entire building. A