The Medusa Amulet Read Free

heads nodding with interest and a low hum of comments. He had thought there might be. This edition of the Divine Comedy was one of the most powerful he had ever seen, and he was making it his mission to find out who the illustrator had been. The title pages of the book had sustained such significant water and smoke damage that no names could be discerned. The book had also had to be intensively treated for mold, and many of the plates bore ineradicable green and blue spots the circumference of a pencil eraser.
    But for David, such blemishes and signs of age only made the books and manuscripts he studied more precious and intriguing. Thevery fact that this book—nearly five hundred years old—had passed through so many unknown hands, and through so many different places, only lent it an air of mystery and importance. When he held it in his hands, he felt connected to that chain of unrecorded readers who had turned its pages before … perhaps in a palazzo in Tuscany, a garret in Paris, or a country seat in England. All he knew of the book’s origins was that it had been donated to the Newberry by a local collector, who had wanted to be sure it would be properly restored, studied, and its treasures made available to all. David had felt honored to be entrusted with the task.
    As he talked, he became not only more relaxed, but positively excited by the opportunity to share some of the discoveries he had made about the methodology that Dante had employed in his use of natural imagery. The poet often included animals in the text, but he also made regular use of the sun (a planet, according to the Ptolemaic system of the time) and the stars, the sea, the leaves of the trees, snow. Though the hall was dimly lighted, David did his best to maintain some eye contact with the audience as he elucidated these points, and midway through he noted a woman all in black, with a small black hat and a veil across her face, slip into the room and take a seat close to the door. The veil was what struck him. Who wore such things anymore, even in mourning? For a second he lost the thread of what he was saying and had to glance down at his notes to remember where he was.
    “The meaning that Dante attaches to these natural elements changes, as we move from the Inferno to the Purgatorio to the Paradiso. ” He continued with his thesis, but his eye was drawn periodically to the mysterious woman in back, and for some reason it popped into his head that she might be the donor of the book, there to see what had become of it. As the images passed by on the screen to his right, he found himself explicating them as if he were talking chiefly to the woman concealed behind the veil. She remained completely still, her hands folded in her lap, her legs in black stockings, and it was all but impossible for him to figure out anything abouther … most notably her age. There were moments he felt she was in her twenties, dressed up as if for a grim costume party, and other times when he suspected she was a more mature woman, perched primly, almost precariously, on the edge of the chair.
    By the time he had shown his last illustration—a whirlwind of leaves, containing the Cumaean Sybil’s prophecies—and wrapped up the lecture with Dante’s closing invocation to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”—he was determined to meet her. But when the lights came up in the exhibit hall, a bunch of hands went up with questions.
    “How will you go about determining the illustrator of this volume? Have you got any leads already?”
    “Was Florence as prominent a publishing center as Pisa or Venice?”
    And, from an eager academic in back, “What would you say about Ruskin’s comment, concerning the flux of consciousness essential to the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ as it pertains to the Comedy ?”
    David did his best to field the queries, but he also knew that he’d been talking for over an hour, and that most of the audience would be eager to get