Looking over the list of families, Percival saw that their influence had once been absolute. In the past three hundred years, however, Nephilistic families had fallen into decline. Once there had been a balance between human and Nephilim. After the Flood they’d been born in almost equal numbers. But Nephilim were deeply attracted to humans and had married into human families, causing the genetic dilution of their most potent qualities. Now Nephilim possessing predominantly human characteristics were common, while those who had pure angelic traits were rare.
With thousands of humans born for every one Nephilim, there was some debate among good families about the relevance of their human-born relations. Some wished to exclude them, push them further into the human realm, while others believed in their value, or at least their use to the larger cause. Cultivating relations with the human members of Nephilim families was a tactical move, one that might yield great results. A child born to Nephilim parents, without the slightest trace of angelic traits, might in turn produce a Nephilistic offspring. It was an uncommon occurrence, to be sure, but not unheard of To address this possibility, the Nephilim observed a tiered system, a caste relating not to wealth or social status—although these criteria mattered as well—but to physical traits, to breeding, to a resemblance to their ancestors, a group of angels called the Watchers. While humans carried the genetic potential to create a Nephilistic child, the Nephilim themselves embodied the angelic ideal. Only a Nephilistic being could develop wings. And Percival’s had been the most magnificent anyone had seen in half a millennium.
He turned the pages of
The Book of Generations,
stopping randomly at a middle section of the book. There was an etching of a noble merchant dressed in velvets and silks, a sword cocked in one hand and a bag of gold in the other. An endless procession of women and slaves knelt around him, awaiting his command, and a concubine stretched out upon a divan at his side, her arms draped over her body. Caressing the picture, Percival read a one-line biography of the merchant describing him “as an elusive nobleman who organized fleets to all corners of the uncivilized world, colonizing wilderness and organizing the natives.” So much had changed in the past three hundred years, so many parts of the globe subdued. The merchant would not recognize the world they lived in today.
Turning to another page, Percival happened upon one of his favorite tales in the book, the story of a famous uncle on his father’s side—Sir Arthur Grigori, a Nephilim of great wealth and renown whom Percival recalled as a marvelous storyteller. Born in the early seventeenth century, Sir Arthur had made wise investments in many of the nascent shipping companies of the British Empire. His faith in the East India Company alone had brought him enormous profit—as his manor house and his cottage and his farmlands and his city apartments could well attest. While he was never directly involved in overseeing his business ventures abroad, Percival knew that his uncle had undertaken journeys around the globe and had amassed a great collection of treasures. Travel had always given him great pleasure, especially when he explored the more exotic corners of the planet, but his primary motive for distant excursion had been business. Sir Arthur had been known for his Svengali-like ability to convince humans to do all he asked of them. Percival arranged the book in his lap and read:
Sir Arthur’s ship arrived just weeks after the infamous uprising of May 1857. From the seas to the Gangetic Plain, in Meerut and Delhi and Kanpur and Lucknow and Jhansi and Gwalior, the Revolt spread, wreaking discord among the hierarchies that governed the land. Peasants overtook their masters, killing and maiming the British with sticks and sabers and whatever weapons they could make or steal to suit their treachery. In Kanpur it was reported that two hundred European women and children were massacred in a single morning, while in Delhi peasants spread gunpowder upon the streets until they appeared covered in pepper. One imbecilic fellow lit a match for his bidi, blowing all and sundry to pieces.
Sir Arthur, seeing that the East India Company had fallen into chaos and fearing that his profits would be affected, called the Governor-General to his apartments one afternoon to discuss what might be done between them to rectify the terrible events. The Governor-General, a portly, pink man with a penchant for chutney, arrived in the hottest hour of the day, a flock of children about him—one holding the umbrella, another holding a fan, and yet another balancing a glass of iced tea upon a tray. Sir Arthur received him with the shades drawn, to keep away the glare of both the sun and curious passersby.
“I must say, Governor-General,” Sir Arthur began, “a revolt is no great greeting.”
“No, sir,” the Governor-General replied, adjusting a polished gold monocle over a bulbous blue eye. “And it is no great farewell, either.”
Seeing that they understood one another very well, the men discussed the matter. For hours they dissected the causes and effects of the revolt. In the end Sir Arthur had a suggestion. “There must be an example made,” he said, drawing a long cigar from a balsam box and lighting it with a lighter, an imprint of the Grigori family crest etched upon its side. “It is essential to drive fear into their hearts. One must create a spectacle that will terrify them into compliance. Together we will choose a village. When we are through with them, there will be no more revolts.”
While the lesson Sir Arthur taught the British soldiers was well known in Nephilistic circles—indeed, they had been practicing such fear-generating tactics privately for many hundreds of years—it was rarely used on such a large group. Under Sir Arthur’s deft command, the soldiers rounded up the people of the chosen village—men, women, and children—and brought them to the market. He chose a child, a girl with almond eyes, silken black hair, and skin the color of chestnuts. The girl gazed curiously at the man, so tall and fair and gaunt, as if to say, Even among the peculiar-looking British, this man is odd. Yet she followed after him, obedient.
Oblivious to the stares of the natives, Sir Arthur led the child before the prisoners of war—as the villagers were now called—lifted her into his arms, and deposited her into the barrel of a loaded cannon. The barrel was long and wide, and it swallowed the child entirely—only her hands were visible as they clung tight to the iron rim, holding it as if it were the top of a well into which she might sink.
“Light the fuse,” Sir Grigori commanded. As the young soldier, his fingers trembling, struck a match, the girl’s mother cried out from the crowd.
The explosion was the first of many that morning. Two hundred village children—the exact number of British killed in the Kanpur massacre—were led one by one to the cannon. The iron grew so hot that it charred the fingers of the soldiers dropping the heavy bundles of wiggling flesh, all hair and fingernails, into the shaft. Restrained at gunpoint, the villagers watched. Once the bloody business was through, the soldiers turned their muskets upon the villagers, ordering them to clean the market courtyard. Pieces of their children hung upon the tents and bushes and carts. Blood stained the earth orange.
News of the horror soon spread to the nearby villages and from those villages to the Gangetic Plain, to Meerut and Delhi and Kanpur and Lucknow and Jhansi and Gwalior. The Revolt, as Sir Arthur Grigori had foretold, quieted.
Percival’s reading was interrupted by the sound of Sneja’s voice as she leaned over his shoulder. “Ah, Sir Arthur,” she said, the shadow of her wings falling over the pages of the book. “He was one of the finest Grigoris, my favorite of your father’s brothers. Such valor! He secured our interests across the globe. If only his end had been as glorious as the rest of his life.”
Percival knew that his mother was referring to Uncle Arthur’s sad and pathetic demise. Sir Arthur had been one of the first in their family to contract the illness that now afflicted Percival. His once-glorious wings had withered to putrid, blackened nubs, and after a decade of terrible suffering his lungs had collapsed. He had died in humiliation and pain, succumbing to the disease in the fifth century of life, a time when he should have been enjoying his retirement. Many had believed the illness to be the result of his exposure to various lower breeds of human life—the wretched natives in the various colonial ports—but the truth of the matter was that the Grigoris did not know the origin of the illness. They knew only that there may be a way to cure it.
In the 1980s Sneja had come into possession of a human scientist’s body of work devoted to the therapeutic properties of certain varieties of music. The scientist had been named Angela Valko and was the daughter of Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko, one of the most renowned angelologists working in Europe. According to Angela Valko’s theories, there was a way to restore Percival, and all their kind, to angelic perfection.
As was her wont, Sneja appeared to be reading her son’s mind. “Despite your best efforts to sabotage your own cure, I believe that your art historian has pointed us in the right direction.”
“You’ve found Verlaine?” Percival asked, closing
The Book of Generations
and turning to his mother. He felt like a child again, wishing to win Sneja’s approval. “Did he have the drawings?”
“As soon as we hear from Otterley, we will know for certain,” Sneja said, taking
The Book of Generations
from Percival and paging through it. “Clearly we overlooked something during our raids. But make no mistake, we will find the object of our search. And you, my angel, will be the first to benefit from its properties. After you are cured, we will be the saviors of our kind.”
“Magnificent,” Percival said, imagining his wings and how lush they would be once they had returned. “I will go to the convent myself. If it is there, I want to be the one to find it.”
“You are too feeble.” Sneja glanced at the glass of scotch. “And drunk. Let Otterley and your father handle this. You and I will stay here.”
Sneja tucked
The Book of Generations
under her arm and, kissing Percival on the cheek, left the billiard room.
The thought of being trapped in New York City during one of the most important moments of his life enraged him. Taking his cane, he walked to the telephone and dialed Otterley’s number once more. As he waited for her to answer, he assured himself that his strength would soon return. He would be beautiful and powerful once more. With the restoration of his wings, all the suffering and humiliation he had endured would be transformed to glory.
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
M
aking her way past the crowd—sisters on their way to work and sisters on their way to prayer—Evangeline tried to maintain equilibrium under the scrutinizing eyes of her superiors. There was little tolerance for public displays of emotion at St. Rose—not pleasure, fear, pain, or remorse. Yet hiding anything at all in the convent proved virtually impossible. Day after day the sisters ate, prayed, cleaned, and rested together, so that even the smallest change in the happiness or anxiety of one sister transmitted itself throughout the group, as if conducted by an invisible wire. Evangeline knew, for example, when Sister Carla was annoyed—three tension lines appeared about her mouth. She knew when Sister Wilhelmina had slept through her morning walk along the river—a restrained glassiness weighed upon her gaze during Mass. Privacy did not exist. One could only wear a mask and hope that the others were too busy to notice.
The enormous oak door that connected the convent to the church stood open night and day, big as a mouth waiting to be fed. Sisters traveled between the two buildings at will, transposing themselves from the gloomy convent to the glorious luminescence of the chapel. To Evangeline, returning to Maria Angelorum throughout the day always felt like going home, as if the spirit were released just slightly from the constraints of the body.
Trying to ease her panic at what had occurred in the library, Evangeline paused at the bulletin board that hung beside the church door. One of her responsibilities in addition to her library duties was the preparation of the Adoration Prayer Schedule, or APS for short. Each week she wrote down the sisters’ regular time slots, careful to mark variations or substitutions, and posted the APS on the large corkboard listing the roster of alternate Prayer Partners in case of illness. Sister Philomena always said, “Never underestimate our reliance upon the APS!”—a statement Evangeline found to be quite correct. Often the sisters scheduled for adoration at night would walk the hallway between the convent and the church in pajamas and slippers, white hair tied up in plain cotton scarves. They would check the APS, glance at their wristwatches, and hurry on to prayer, assured in the soundness of the schedule that had kept perpetual prayer alive for two hundred years.
Taking solace in the exactitude of her work, Evangeline left the APS, dipped a finger in holy water, and genuflected. Walking through the church, she felt calmed by the regularity of her actions, and by the time she approached the chapel, she felt a sense of renewed serenity. Inside, Sisters Divinia and Davida knelt at the altar, prayer partners from three to four. Sitting at the back, careful not to disturb Divinia and Davida, Evangeline took her rosary from her pocket and began to count the beads. Soon her prayer took rhythm.
For Evangeline—who had always endeavored to assess her thoughts with a clinical, incisive eye—prayer was an opportunity for self-examination. In her childhood years at St. Rose, long before she had taken vows and with them the responsibility of her five o’clock prayer shift, she would visit the Adoration Chapel many times a day for the sole purpose of trying to understand the anatomy of her memories-stark, frightening recollections she often wished to leave behind. For many years the ritual had helped her to forget.
But this afternoon’s encounter with Verlaine had shaken her profoundly. His inquiries had brought Evangeline’s thoughts, for the second time that day, back to an event she wished to forget.