“Take this,” Dr. Raphael said. “Everything is ready. You will be driven to the border tonight. Then, I’m afraid, we’ll have to rely upon our friends in Spain and Portugal to get you through.”
“Through to where?”
“To America,” Dr. Raphael said. “You will take this case with you. You-and the treasure from the gorge-will be safe there.”
“But I saw Gabriella leave,” I said, examining the case as if it were an illusion. “She took the instrument. It is gone.”
“It was a replica, dear Celestine, a decoy,” Dr. Raphael said. “Gabriella is diverting the enemy so that you can escape and Seraphina can be freed. You owe her much, including your presence on the expedition. The lyre is now in your care. You and Gabriella have gone your separate ways, but you must always remember that your work is for a single cause. Hers will be here, and yours will be in America.”
THE THIRD SPHERE
And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers: their feet were purple, their wings brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow.
– The Book of Enoch
Sister Evangeline’s cell, St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
December 24, 1999, 12:01 A.M.
Evangeline went to the window, pushed back the heavy curtains, and gazed into the darkness. From the fourth floor, she could see clear across the river. At scheduled times each night, the passenger train cut through the dark, slicing a bright trail against the landscape. The presence of the night train comforted Evangeline-it was as reliable as the workings of St. Rose Convent. The train passed, the sisters walked to prayer, the heat seeped from steam radiators, the wind rattled the windowpanes. The universe moved in regular cycles. The sun would rise in a few hours, and when it did, Evangeline would begin another day, following the rigid schedule she had followed every other day: prayer, breakfast, Mass, library work, lunch, prayer, chores, library work, Mass, dinner. Her life moved in spheres as regular as the beads on a rosary.
Sometimes Evangeline would watch the train and imagine the shadowy outline of a traveler making his precarious way through the aisle. The train and the man would flash by and then, in a clatter of metal and neon light, move off to some unknown destination. Gazing into the darkness, she longed for the train carrying Verlaine to pass while she watched.
Evangeline’s room was the size of a linen closet and, appropriately, smelled of freshly laundered linens. She had recently waxed the pine floor, cleaned the corners of spiderwebs, and dusted the room from floor to ceiling and wainscoting to sill. The stiff white sheets on her bed seemed to call out to her to take her shoes off and lie down to sleep. Instead she poured water from a pitcher into a glass on the bureau and drank. Then she opened the window and took a deep breath. The air was cold and thick in her lungs, soothing as ice on a wound. She was so tired she could hardly think. The clock’s electric digits gave the hour. It was just after midnight. A new day was beginning.
Sitting upon her bed, Evangeline closed her eyes and let all thoughts of the previous day’s encounter settle. She took the pack of letters Sister Celestine had given her and counted. There were eleven envelopes, one sent each year, the return address-a New York City address she did not recognize-the same on each one. Her grandmother had posted letters with remarkable consistency, the cancellation on the stamp dating the twenty-first of December. A card had arrived annually, from 1988 until 1998. Only the present year’s card was not among them.
Careful, so as not to rip the faces of the envelopes, Evangeline removed the cards and examined them, arranging them in chronological order across the surface of the bed, from the first card to arrive to the last. The cards were covered in pen-and-ink sketches, bold blue lines that did not appear to form any specific image. The designs had been executed by hand, although Evangeline could not understand the purpose or meaning of the images. One of the cards contained a sketch of an angel climbing a ladder, an elegant, modern depiction that had none of the excesses of the angelic images in Maria Angelorum.
Although many sisters did not agree with her, Evangeline much preferred artistic depictions of angels to the biblical descriptions, which she found frightening to imagine. Ezekiel’s wheels, for example, were described in the Bible as beryl-plated and circular, with hundreds of eyes lining their outer rims. The cherubim were said to have four faces-a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. This ancient vision of God’s messengers was unnerving, almost grotesque, when compared with the Renaissance painters’ work, which forever changed the visual representation of angels. Angels blowing trumpets, carrying harps, and hiding behind delicate wings-these were the angels Evangeline cherished, no matter how removed from biblical reality they were.
Evangeline examined the cards one by one. On the first card, dated December 1988, there was the image of an angel blowing a golden trumpet, its white robes traced in gold. When she opened it, she found a piece of creamy paper fastened inside. A message, written with crimson ink in her grandmother’s elegant hand, read:
Be forewarned, dear Evangeline: Understanding the significance of Orpheus’s lyre has proved to be a trial. Legend surrounds Orpheus so heavily that we cannot discern the precise outline of his mortal life. We do not know the year of his birth, his true lineage, or the real measure of his talents with the lyre. He was reputed to have been born of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus, but this, of course, is mythology, and it is our work to separate the mythological from the historical, disentangle legend from fact, magic from truth. Did he give humanity poetry? Did he discover the lyre on his legendary journey to the underworld? Was he as influential in his own lifetime as history claims? By the sixth century B.C., he was known through the Greek world as the master of songs and music, but how he came upon the instrument of the angels has been widely debated among historians. Your mother’s work only gave confirmation to long-held theories of the lyre’s importance.
Evangeline turned the paper over in her hand, hoping the red ink would continue. Surely the message was a fragment of a larger communication. But she found nothing.
She glanced about her bedroom-the solid edges of which had gone soft as her exhaustion grew-then turned back to the cards. She opened another card and then another. There were identical creamy pages fastened inside each card, all of which had been filled with lines of writing that began and ended without any discernible logic whatsoever. Of the eleven cards, only the one addressed to her contained a definite starting or ending point. There were no numbers on the pages, and the order could not be discerned from the chronology in which they’d been mailed. In fact, it appeared to Evangeline that the pages had been simply filled up with an endless stream of words. To make matters worse, the words were so small it strained her eyes to read them.
After examining the pages for some time, Evangeline returned each card to its envelope, being sure to keep the envelopes in the order of cancellation date. The effort of trying to understand the tangled pages of her grandmother’s writing made her head throb. She could not think clearly, and the pain in her temples was acute. She should have gone to sleep hours before. Bundling the cards together, she placed them under her pillow, careful not to bend or crease the edges. She could do nothing more until she had some sleep.