Night had smothered the city, and the city gave up its protest in uncountable millions of bubbles and gasps of light. Below was glittering Manhattan. The east was black. The opaque hilly horizon of the west was razor-edged against a last gleam of cold white light. Destroyers rode the unbridged Hudson; ferries and small craft flecked her with light. The East River lay her dark secretive self…a cool, lamp-spotted, many-bridged stream between the sprawling white conflagrations of Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was terrifyingly beautiful up on the roof, four hundred feet above the gaudy streets, four hundred feet up in the cool dark silences, four hundred feet up nearer the stars….

Mr. Blue put his hands into his trouser pockets and leaned backward, his face toward the heavens, now filling with stars.

The mother of Constantine the Great, St. Helena Empress lived from the middle of the third century to the beginning of the fourth. She became the wife or concubine (the records are unclear) of Constantius, Constantine’s father, while he was still a soldier; when Constantius became emperor, he divorced her in favor of a new bride of higher social station. But then, when Constantine succeeded Constantius, Constantine, who was always close to her, gave his mother the status of empress, bringing her back to the imperial court. 

Around A.D. 320, Helena–how this idea came to her remains unclear– went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to find the True Cross, the cross on which Christ was crucified. In Jerusalem she built two new churches, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and a church on the Mount of Olives. And she returned to Europe with relics that included what she believed to be thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns, nails from the cross, and fragments of the True Cross itself.

From Evelyn Waugh’s article about her: