Angelology

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

“
Angelology
lets loose the ancient fallen angels to the modern world with devastating results. Trussoni has written a holy thriller that will arrest your attention from the opening pages and not let go till its mysteries take wing.”

—Keith Donohue, author of
The Stolen Child and Angels of Destruction

“Danielle Trussoni has written a great, cracking thunderbolt of a story.
Angelology
is an exquisitely crafted adventure into untold realms of imagination, religion, and history. Meticulous in its research and delicious in its execution, the novel weaves Western theology together with ancient myth in a way that will make readers question what they think they know about angels. A triumph.”

—Kathenne Howe, author of
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

“
Angelology
by Danielle Trussoni is a thrilling, gorgeous read. Atmospheric, beguiling, and—if you’ll pardon the pun—diabolically good.”

—Raymond Khoury, author of
The Last Templar and Sanctuary

“Danielle Trussoni creates a gorgeous gothic world for the reader, where the people who surround us are not what they seem, and stories are unveiled as more truth than fable. This is a book that resonates as both haunting and holy. A must-read.”

—Brunonia Barry, author of
The Lace Reader

ALSO BY DANIELLE TRUSSONI

Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Danielle Trussoni, 2010

All rights reserved

 

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Trussoni, Danielle.
Angelology : a novel / Danielle Trussoni.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18998-6

 

1. Nuns—Fiction. 2. Angels—Fiction. 3. Armageddon—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3620.R93A83 2010
8l3’.6—dc22 2009041430

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

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Winter 1943

 

T
he angelologists examined the body. It was intact, without decay, the skin as smooth and as white as parchment. The lifeless aquamarine eyes gazed heavenward. Pale curls fell against a high forehead and sculptural shoulders, forming a halo of golden hair. Even the robes—the cloth woven of a white shimmering metallic material that none of them could identify exactly—remained pristine, as if the creature had died in a hospital room in Paris and not a cavern deep below the earth.

It should not have surprised them to find the angel in that preserved condition. The fingernails, nacreous as the inside of an oyster shell; the long smooth navel-less stomach; the eerie translucency of the skin—everything about the creature was as they knew it would be, even the positioning of the wings was correct. And yet it was too lovely, too vital for something they had studied only in airless libraries, prints of quattrocento paintings spread before them like road maps. All their professional lives they had waited to see it. Although not one of them would have admitted so, they secretly suspected to find a monstrous corpse, all bones and fiber shreds, like something unearthed from an archaeological dig. Instead there was this: a delicate tapering hand, an aquiline nose, pink lips pressed in a frozen kiss. The angelologists hovered above the body, gazing down in anticipation, as if they expected the creature to blink its eyes and wake.

—Boethius,
The Consolation of Philosophy

 

E
vangeline woke before the sun came up, when the fourth floor was silent and dark. Quiet, so as not to wake the sisters who had prayed through the night, she gathered her shoes, stockings, and skirt in her arms and walked barefoot to the communal lavatory. She dressed quickly, half asleep, without looking in the mirror. From a sliver of bathroom window, she surveyed the convent grounds, covered in a predawn haze. A vast snowy courtyard stretched to the water’s edge, where a scrim of barren trees limned the Hudson. St. Rose Convent perched precariously close to the river, so close that in daylight there seemed to be two convents—one on land and one wavering lightly upon the water, the first folding out into the next, an illusion broken in summer by barges and in winter by teeth of ice. Evangeline watched the river flow by, a wide strip of black against the pure white snow. Soon morning would gild the water with sunlight.