“Tell me,” Evangeline said, her voice steady to mask her growing distress. “What danger do you speak of?”
Celestine’s voice was little more than a whisper as she said, “‘A cette époque-là, il y avait des géants sur la terre, et aussi après que les fils de Dieu se furent unis aux filles des hommes et qu’elles leur eurent donné des enfants. Ce sont ces héros si fameux d’autrefois.’”
Evangeline understood French: indeed, it was her mother’s native tongue, and her mother had spoken to her exclusively in French. But she had not heard the language spoken in more than fifteen years.
Celestine’s voice was sharp, rapid, vehement as she repeated the words in English. “‘There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’”
In English the passage was familiar to Evangeline, its placement in the Bible clear in her mind. “It is from Genesis,” she said, relieved that she understood at least a fraction of what Sister Celestine was saying. “I know the passage. It occurs just before the Flood.”
“Pardon?” Celestine looked at Evangeline as if she had never seen her before.
“The passage you quoted from Genesis,” Evangeline said. “I know it well.”
“No,” Celestine said, her gaze suddenly full of animosity. “You do not understand.”
Evangeline placed her hand on Celestine’s, to calm her, but it was too late-Celestine had worked herself into a fury. She whispered, “In the beginning, human and divine relations were in symmetry. There was order in the cosmos. The legions of angels were filed in strict regiments; man and woman-God’s most adored, made in his own image-lived in bliss, free from pain. Suffering did not exist; death did not exist; time did not exist. There was no reason for such elements. The universe was perfectly static, and pure in its refusal to move forward. But the angels could not rest in such a state. They grew jealous of man. The dark angels tempted humanity out of pride, but also to cause God pain. And so the angels fell as man fell.”
Realizing that it would only do more harm to allow Celestine to continue such madness, Evangeline pulled at the letter resting under Celestine’s trembling fingers, removing it with deliberation. Folding it into her pocket, she stood. “Forgive me, Sister,” she said. “I did not mean to disturb you in this fashion.”
“Go!” Celestine said, shaking violently. “Go at once and leave me in peace!”
Confused and more than a little afraid, Evangeline closed Celestine’s door and half walked, half ran down the narrow hallway to the stairwell.
Most afternoons Sister Philomena’s naps lasted until she was called to dinner, and so it was little surprise, then, that the library was empty when Evangeline arrived, the fireplace cold and the trolley stacked with volumes waiting to be returned to their shelves. Ignoring the mess of books, Evangeline endeavored to build a fire to warm the frigid room. She stacked two pieces of wood in the grating, packing the underbelly with crumpled newspaper, and struck a match. Once the flames began to catch, she stood and straightened her skirt with her small, cold hands, as if smoothing the fabric might help her gain focus. One thing was certain: She would need all the concentration she could muster to bring herself to sort through Celestine’s story. She removed a piece of folded paper from the pocket of her skirt, unfolded it, and read the letter from Mr. Verlaine:
In the process of conducting research for a private client, it has come to my attention that Mrs. Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, matriarch of the Rockefeller family and patron of the arts, may have briefly corresponded with the abbess of St. Rose Convent, Mother Innocenta, in the years 1943-1944.
It was nothing more than a harmless note asking to visit St. Rose Convent, the kind of letter institutions with collections of rare books and images received on a regular basis, the kind of letter that Evangeline should have responded to with a swift and efficient refusal and, once posted, should have forgotten forever. Yet this simple request had turned everything upside down. She was both wary and consumed by the intense curiosity she felt about Sister Celestine, Mrs. Abigail Rockefeller, Mother Innocenta, and the practice of angelology. She wished to understand the work her parents had performed, and yet she longed for the luxury of ignorance. Celestine’s words had echoed deeply within her, as if she had come to St. Rose for the very purpose of hearing them. Even so, the possible connection between Celestine’s history and her own caused Evangeline the most profound agitation.
Her one consolation was that the library was utterly still. She sat at a table near the fireplace, placed her pointy elbows upon the wooden surface, and rested her head in her hands, trying to clear her mind. Although the fire had risen, a trickle of freezing air seeped from the fireplace, creating a current of intense heat and biting cold that resulted in a strange mixture of sensations upon her skin. She tried to reconstruct Celestine’s jumbled story as best she could. Taking a piece of paper and a red marker from a drawer in the table, she jotted the words in a list:
Devil’s Throat Cavern
Rhodope Mountains
Genesis 6
Angelologists
When in need of guidance, Evangeline was more like a tortoise than a young woman-she retreated into a cool, dark space inside herself, became completely still, and waited for the confusion to pass. For half an hour, she stared at the words she had written-“Devil’s Throat, Rhodope Mountains, Genesis 6, Angelologists.” If anyone had told her the previous day that these words would be written by her, confronting her when she least expected them, she would have laughed. Yet these very words were the pillars of Sister Celestine’s story. With Mrs. Abigail Rockefeller’s role in the mystery-as the letter she’d found implied-Evangeline had no choice but to decipher their relation.
While her impulse was to analyze the list until the connections magically revealed themselves, Evangeline knew better than to wait. She crossed the now-warm library and removed an oversize world atlas from a shelf. Opening it upon a table, she found a listing for the Rhodope Mountains in the index and turned to the appropriate page at the center of the atlas. The Rhodopes turned out to be a minor chain of mountains in southeastern Europe spanning the area from northern Greece into southern Bulgaria. Evangeline examined the map, hoping to find some reference to the Devil’s Throat, but the entire region was a mottle of shaded bumps and triangles on the map, signifying elevated terrain.
She recalled that Celestine had mentioned entering the Rhodopes through Greece, and so, running her finger south, to the sea-locked Grecian mainland, Evangeline found the point where the Rhodopes rose from the plains. Green and gray covered the areas near the mountains, pointing to a depressed level of population. The only major roads seemed to emerge from Kavala, a port city on the Thracian Sea where a network of highways extended to the smaller towns and villages in the north. Moving her eye to the south of the mountain chain and down into the peninsula, she saw the more familiar names of Athens and Sparta, places she’d read of in her study of classical literature. Here were the ancient cities she had always associated with Greece. She’d never heard of the remote sliver of mountain that fell over its northernmost border with Bulgaria.
Realizing that she could learn only so much about the region from a map, Evangeline turned to a set of careworn 1960s encyclopedias and located an entry on the Rhodope Mountains. At the center of the page, she found a black-and-white photograph of a gaping cave. Below the photo she read:
The Devil’s Throat is a cavern cut deep into the core of the Rhodope mountain chain. A narrow gap sliced into the immense rock of the mountainside, the cavern descends deep below the earth, forming a breathtaking shaft of air in the solid granite. The passageway is marked by a massive internal waterfall that cascades over the rock, leveling to form a subterranean river. A series of natural enclosures at the bottom of the gorge have long been the source of legend. Early explorers reported strange lights and feelings of euphoria upon entering these discrete caves, a phenomenon that may be explained by pockets of natural gases.