Bestiary

“The Getty Museum, as you know, has one of the most extensive collections of illuminated manuscripts in the world,” Beth said, “and these ecclesiastical works, most of them dating from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, were produced for English priories and monastery libraries.” She was doing her standard spiel, parts of which she had recorded for the audio tour, but Van Nostrand didn’t seem to mind a bit. “These manuscripts were considered prized possessions, and many monasteries — including Abingdon, Waltham, Worcester, and Christ Church in Canterbury — kept a list of exactly what they had in their catalogue. They also kept their books chained, literally, to pulpits and lecterns.”

“Yes,” Van Nostrand said, “the exhibition made all that quite clear. What I was wondering, though,” he added, a pastry crumb still clinging to his lower lip, “was what fascinated you about them? What makes a beautiful young woman, if I may say so—”

He waited for a reaction, and Beth simply smiled, saying nothing.

“—decide to devote herself to such an arcane and, some would call it, dusty, subject?”

Should she tell him about the crumb? She elected not to. “Their beauty, I think, was what first attracted me to illuminated manuscripts.”

“All that glitter and gold?”

“In some cases,” she said, warming, despite herself, to her subject. “Many of these medieval works are pretty spectacular, especially the ones made for emperors and kings. But many of them are more humble than that; we call them illuminated, using the term loosely, but technically they’re not. They don’t have the metallic gold or silver decoration that the word ‘illuminated’ connotes. But they’re still quite beautifully made, and beautifully written, objects.”

“And how did you make this selection, for your current exhibition?”

Beth had the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, that he was just asking these questions to keep her there and occupied. But if the alternative was to return to Mrs. Cabot and the Critchleys, she would stay.

“I had noticed some interesting things about these particular manuscripts. Although they had been owned by different monasteries, sometimes in quite different parts of the country, they all had a distinctive writing style and decoration. These books, as I’m sure you know”—it never hurt to flatter your interlocutor—“were generally unsigned, written anonymously by monks in open cloisters and drafty scriptoria. But the books in this exhibition all displayed, to my mind, a common creator.”

“How? The text was always pretty much the same, wasn’t it? Bibles, patristic commentaries, Gospels?”

So he was paying some attention, after all.

“Yes, that’s true, though even in that respect there was greater latitude than is generally accepted. There’s a lot of room between the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Room for Livy’s History of Rome and Aristotle’s Ethics, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Adventures of Marco Polo. In fact, King Charles V of France was such a Marco Polo fan that he had five copies of the book, one of them bound in gold cloth.”

“But those books span centuries.”

“That’s correct, but the monk, or scribe, to whom I’m attributing the works collected in this exhibition, lived in the mid to late eleventh century, and he wrote, whatever his subject, with a distinctively sloping script, tilted slightly to the left. He might have been left-handed, or he might have had a problem with his vision. His illustrations are remarkable — they have a rare psychological acuity to them.” Where most such figures were stiffly drawn and without expression, Beth felt that this unknown scribe had found a way to convey feeling and nuance to his work.

“Hold on,” Van Nostrand said. “I bow, of course, to your superior wisdom in these matters, but weren’t the scribes, who did the text, and the illuminators, who did the artwork, two different people?”

“Yes,” Beth said. “Generally they were. But something tells me that this one man — the Michelangelo of the illuminated world — did both. When I called this exhibition ‘The Genius of the Cloister,’ I meant the phrase to be taken in two ways: as a tribute to the talents of the monks in general and as a nod to the one man I believe surpassed them all.”

Van Nostrand still looked dubious, so Beth decided to give him something more tangible to hang on to. “And this man, this artist, was proud of his achievement. Even though the work was generally done anonymously, he always managed to insert something of himself, somewhere, into the written text.”

“Surely not into the Bible?”

“Oh no,” Beth said, “he wouldn’t have done that. That would have cost him his job, or his place in the religious order. No, he had a more unusual way of making himself known.”

“And that was…?” The crumb, hanging off his lip, finally relinquished its hold and drifted off on the evening breeze.

“He cursed.”

“He what?”

“He laid a curse on anyone who stole or defaced his work.”

Van Nostrand laughed, and Beth did, too. It was the very thing that had made her first connect the various books now in the exhibition. On the top of a Reading Abbey manuscript roughly a thousand years old, it said, Liber sancte Marie Radying[ensis] quem qui alienaverit anathema sit. Or, in other words, ‘Cursed be he who tampers with this book.’ On other manuscripts, drawn from all over the British Isles, there were similar curses, some of them even more colorful and elaborate. In fact, though it was difficult to date all the manuscripts exactly, it seemed to Beth that the unknown monk had grown more obstreperous all the time, until at some point he abruptly vanished from the scene — as did his work. Had his health failed? Had he died? Was he no longer commissioned to do such work? And who, finally, was he?

This exhibition was Beth’s first concerted attempt to find him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Carter said, slipping up behind her, then extending a hand to Van Nostrand. “Carter Cox.”

“Alexander Van Nostrand. Art News.”

Beth turned to her husband — no red bow tie here, just an open-collared blue Oxford-cloth shirt, a navy blue blazer, and khaki pants. She used to kid him that he simply bought his outfits off the Brooks Brothers mannequins.

“Ah, so you are the lucky husband?”

Carter smiled and said, “I hear that a lot.”

Even now, after several years of marriage, Beth always enjoyed looking at her husband — at the way his brown hair flopped over his forehead, the way his dark eyes focused so intently on whatever, or whomever, he was looking at, the way he carried his tall and rangy frame. He was to her mind the perfect combination, with something of the professor and something of the cowboy in him.

“I’m sure you do,” Van Nostrand said. “Because she’s as erudite as she is beautiful.” Van Nostrand took her hand in a mock courtly fashion and said, “Unfortunately, LACMA calls. But I would love to talk to you some more about your exhibition. I’ll call later in the week, if that’s alright.”

Beth assured him that it was, then, slipping her arm through Carter’s, turned back toward the other party guests. The gold damask tablecloths were rippling softly in the evening breeze.

“Where’s the ogre?” Carter asked.

“Watch what you say,” Beth murmured. “She’s right over there, under the trellis, with a couple of museum patrons.”

In fact, at spotting Beth, she began to wave wildly, and then started stumping across the lawn in their direction.

“Did you do something wrong?” Carter asked in low tones. “Am I not on the guest list?”

“I have no idea.”

Taking the bull by the horns, Carter stepped forward and said, “Good evening, Mrs. Cabot. It’s a pleasure to see you.”

“None of that,” she said, dismissing his comments with a wave of the hand, “it’s Beth I need.”

“I just finished talking to the Art News writer, and—”

“Mr. al-Kalli is coming; he’ll be here any minute.”