The night she had given him the leather case containing the lyre he would have married her. He would have brought her into their circle, even against the objections of his parents, who long suspected that she was a spy working to infiltrate the Grigori family. Percival had defended her. But when his mother had taken the lyre to be examined by a German specialist in the history of musical instruments, a man often called upon to verify Nazi treasures, they found that the lyre was nothing more than a well-rendered replica, an ancient Syrian specimen made of cattle bone. Gabriella had lied to him. He had been humiliated and ridiculed for his faith in Gabriella, whom Sneja had never trusted.
After the betrayal he’d washed his hands of Gabriella, leaving her to the others, a decision he found painful. He learned sometime later that her punishment had been exceptionally severe. It had been his intention that she die-indeed, he had instructed that she be killed rather than tortured-but through some combination of luck and extraordinary planning on the part of her colleagues she had been rescued. She recovered and went on to marry Raphael Valko, a match that assisted her career advancement. Percival would be the first to admit that Gabriella was the best in her field, one of the few angelologists to fully penetrate their world.
In reality he had not spoken to Gabriella for more than fifty years. Like the others, she had been kept under continual surveillance, her professional and personal activities monitored at all times of the day and night. He knew that she was living in New York City and that she continued her work against him and his family. But Percival knew very little about the details of her personal life. After their affair his family had made sure that all information about Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko be kept from him.
The last he’d heard, Gabriella was still struggling against the inevitable decline of angelology, fighting against the hopelessness of their cause. He imagined that she would be old now, her face still beautiful but fallen. She would look nothing at all like the frivolous, silly young woman now sitting across from him. Percival leaned back in his chair and examined the woman-her ridiculously low-cut blouse and her uncouth jewelry. She had become drunk-in fact, she had more than likely been so even before he’d ordered the champagne. The tawdry woman before him was nothing at all like Gabriella.
“Come with me,” Percival said, throwing a stack of bills on the table. He put on his overcoat, took up his cane, and walked out into the night, his arm about the young woman. She was tall and thin, larger-boned than Gabriella. Percival could feel the pure sexual attraction between them-since the beginning it had been thus, human women falling prey to angelic charm.
This one was no different from the others. She went along with Percival willingly, and for some blocks they walked in silence until, finding a secluded alley, he took her by the hand and led her into the shadows. The unbearable, almost animal desire he felt for her fueled his anger. He kissed her, made love to her, and then, in a rage, he encircled her delicate, warm throat with his long, cold fingers and pressed the bones until they began to snap. The young woman grunted and pushed him away, struggling to free herself from his grip, but it was too late: Percival Grigori was caught up in the kill. The ecstasy of her pain, the sheer bliss of her struggle, sent shudders of desire through him. Imagining that it was Gabriella in his grasp only made the pleasure more acute.
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Evangeline woke at three in the morning in a panic. After years of abiding a rigorously strict routine, she had the tendency to become disoriented when she deviated from her schedule. Glancing about her room and feeling the pull of sleep weighing upon her senses, she decided that what she saw was not her chamber at all but a small, orderly room with immaculate windowpanes and dusted shelves that existed in a dream, and she went back to sleep.
The fleeting image of her mother and father appeared before her. They stood together in the apartment in Paris, her childhood home. In the dream her father was young and handsome, happier than Evangeline had seen him after her mother’s death. Her mother-even in the midst of dreaming, Evangeline struggled to see her-stood in the distance, a shadowy figure, her face obscured by a sun hat. Evangeline reached for her, desperate to touch her mother’s hand. From the depths of her dream, she called for her mother to come closer. But as she strained to be near to her, Angela receded, dissolving like a diaphanous, insubstantial fog.
Evangeline woke for a second time, startled by the intensity of the dream. The bright red light of her alarm clock illuminated three numbers-4:55. A shot of electricity sparked through her: She was about to be late for her scheduled hour of adoration. As she blinked and looked about the room, she realized that she had left the drapes open, and her chamber absorbed the night sky. Her white sheets were tinted grayish purple, as if covered in ash. Standing at her bedside, she stepped into her black skirt, buttoned her white blouse, and fitted her veil over her hair.
As she recalled her dream, a wave of longing enveloped her. No matter how much time passed, Evangeline felt her parents’ absence as acutely as she had as a child. Her father had died suddenly three years before, his heart stopping in his sleep. Though she observed the date of his death each year, performing a novena in his honor, it was difficult to reconcile herself to the fact that he would not know how she’d grown and changed since taking vows, how she’d become more like him than either of them would have thought possible. He’d told her many times that in temperament she was like her mother-both were ambitious and single-minded, eyes trained blindly upon the end rather than the means. But in truth, it was the stamp of his personality that had been impressed upon Evangeline.
Evangeline was about to leave when she remembered the cards from her grandmother that had so frustrated her the night before. She reached under her pillow, sorted through them, and, despite the fact that she was late for adoration, decided to try one more time to understand the tangled words her grandmother had sent to her.
She removed the cards from the envelopes and placed them upon the bed. One of the images caught her attention. In her exhaustion, she had overlooked it the previous night. It was a pale sketch of an angel, its hands upon the rungs of a ladder. She was certain she had seen the image before, although she could not recall where she’d come across it or why it seemed so familiar. The hint of recognition compelled her to move another card next to it, and as she did so, something clicked in her mind. Suddenly the images made sense: The sketches of angels on the cards were fragments of a larger picture.
Evangeline rearranged the pieces, moving them into various shapes, matching colors and borders as if constructing a jigsaw puzzle until a whole panorama emerged-swarms of brilliant angels stepping up an elegant spiral staircase and into a burst of heavenly light. Evangeline knew the picture well. It was a reproduction of William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder, a watercolor her father had taken her to see in the British Museum as a girl. Her mother had loved William Blake-she had collected books of Blake’s poetry and prints, and her father had bought a print of Jacob’s Ladder for Angela as a gift. They had brought it with them to America after Angela’s death. It was one of the only images that had adorned their plain apartment in Brooklyn.