Free Bestiary by Robert Masello

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