It was almost too much to accept.
And to believe it truly, she would need to confirm it with her own eyes. She would need to compare the original letter with the handwritten text in the manuscripts she had assembled for display. She scooped up the printouts, along with the ancient letter itself, and hurried out of her office.
“Where are you off to?” Elvis said as she shot past.
“The manuscripts exhibit.”
“You haven’t seen it?” he said, mockingly. “You put it together.”
In the plaza outside, the leaves of the London plane trees were rustling in the dry wind that swept the Getty’s hilltop site, but there was no one, not even a security patrol, anywhere around. The sound of Beth’s heels echoed across the stone courtyard as she marched to the North Pavilion, where a red and gold banner above the entrance proclaimed THE GENIUS OF THE CLOISTER: ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. At the access panel, she entered first her own security code, and then the code to unlock the doors. She heard a faint buzzing, and quickly entered the hall. The heavy glass door slowly closed, and clicked shut, behind her. The motion sensors responded by turning on the overhead lights.
But they did not provide much in the way of illumination. The manuscripts were so precious, and so prone to fading, that the ambient light was kept to a bare minimum. Instead, each manuscript was gently cradled in its own display case — two dozen or so, ranged around the three rooms of the exhibition hall — and indirectly lighted by small tungsten halogen lamps inside the glass. The effect was to make the manuscripts shine like beacons, their burnished gold glittering like autumn leaves, the lapis lazuli gleaming like the Mediterranean, the red and blue and purple gemstones in their covers and bindings sparkling like a kaleidoscope. The first time Beth had seen the exhibition completely installed, she had stepped back, breathless at its beauty.
But now she went straight to the nearest display case, one that held a sacramentary, illuminated for the Cathedral Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. The book was open to its frontispiece, depicting the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles at Pentecost. But now she looked at it with fresh eyes. Now she looked at it not as the work of an anonymous, though brilliant, traveling artist, but as an example of the work of a man who went by Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds. Could she see in it the same techniques, the same flair, that she had been studying for weeks in The Beasts of Eden? There was indeed a fluidity to the motion of the Apostles, their hands raised toward heaven, that suggested the work of the master, but it did not equal the artistry of his last great work for the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.
She moved past it, to the first display case in the next room. And here she found an herbal, a treatise on plants and their medicinal uses, created for the English abbey of St. Augustine’s. A flowered stem, its crimson leaves now faded to russet, extended itself all the way across the page, while the text — drawn, as was the custom, from the ancient Greeks rather than practical observation — flowed all around it. The imagination of the design was striking — Beth couldn’t help but think of the splashy layouts in glossy fashion magazines — and the text, she could see now, bore the same unmistakable slant of the writing in the al-Kalli bestiary. Yes, she thought, it was all coming together!
But she would not be satisfied until she had seen another colophon, that final salutation by the scribe, and she knew exactly where to find one. A good example was on display in the last room, in a copy of the Apocalypse from East Anglia. At its end, she knew, there came a curse.
As she stepped into the room, the light sensors automatically responded, but this was still the gloomiest and most remote part of the exhibition. The display cases here were more widely spaced, and the shadows deeper and wider. And even though Beth had become accustomed over the years to working alone in empty museum halls, sometimes even late into the night, she wasn’t always impervious to the spooky aspects of the job. She reminded herself now that it was only late afternoon outside, that the sun was shining, that Elvis was sitting up in their office, playing some idiotic computer game. And that she would be done very soon — she would study the colophons, one against the other, and lay to rest any doubt whatsoever. And then her quest would be at an end, her discovery complete.
Still, she went quickly to the last case in the room, where the Apocalypse — better known in the Protestant tradition as the Book of Revelation — was on display. The illustration was of a seven-headed dragon, writhing in an ocean of fire. And she knew, from her work on the exhibition, that the final words of the biblical text were a warning to anyone who dared to alter or subtract anything from the Apocalypse; to do so, the book declared, would be to write yourself out of the book of life, for all eternity. Below that, separated by a miniature of a child being raised to heaven, came the colophon — in the form of a curse that echoed the final lines of the Apocalypse itself. In elegant Latin, it said that anyone daring to injure or deface the book before them would be stricken from the book of life, too.
Although she hardly needed to, Beth took the last page of Ambrosius’s letter from the folder under her arm, placed the rest of the papers on the floor, and then held the page up to the pale light emanating from the display case. The curses, in their very nature, not to mention the rhythm of the prose, were strikingly similar; the ornate character of the lettering was virtually identical, and the handwriting itself, tight and slanted to the left, was unmistakable. Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds — artist and soldier, scoundrel and Crusader, an unknown genius whose bizarre journey had taken him from the cloisters of Canterbury to his terrible end in a sultan’s maze — was the author of both, and the Michelangelo of his age.
And only Beth knew who he was.
She had hardly had time to savor her victory before she heard, in low tones from the shadows at the rear of the gallery, “Don’t be afraid.”
And suddenly she was as afraid as she had ever been in her life.
It was as if the shadows were coalescing, taking shape… the shape of a man — tall and elegant, with perfectly chiseled features, in a suit that seemed made of the darkness itself — who now took a silent step forward. His white-blond hair, which swept away from his forehead, glinted in the overhead lights. His eyes were concealed behind small round glasses with amber lenses.
“But you are afraid,” he said, in that strangely foreign accent.
The gallery was suffused with the scent of a forest, right after a light rain.
Beth wanted to turn and run — and as if the intruder had sensed that, he stopped where he was — but she could barely move.
“Consider this,” he said. “If I had wanted to harm you, or your son, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”
Her worst nightmare was now reaclass="underline" Arius was alive; Arius was here. All the times she had tried to persuade herself that it was just her imagination playing tricks, all the times that she had told herself that she was making something out of nothing… she’d been wrong.