Angelology by Danielle Trussoni Read Free Book Online

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 whatever shelf space was available. The mundane task of finding a work of nonfiction was as much a matter of luck as an impromptu miracle. The library was given over to such chaos until Sister Lucrezia (1851—1923) imposed alphabetization at the turn of the twentieth century. When a later librarian, Sister Drusilla (1890—1985), suggested the Dewey decimal system, there was a general outcry. Rather than succumb to gross systemization, the sisters agreed to the ledger, writing each book’s title in blue ink on the thick paper.
    Evangeline’s interests were more practical, and she would rather pore over the lists of local charities run by the sisters—the food bank in Poughkeepsie, the Spirit of World Peace Study Group in Milton, and the St. Rose-Salvation Army Annual Clothes Drive that had drop-off locations from Woodstock