“Who were they?” Allison asked, sounding like she was truly, truly interested.

Our hostess was delighted to explain. Their glory would shine upon her like the reflected light of the moon. She led us into the living room, chatting with Allison beside her, and me trailing behind. There were many guests, standing, sitting, being very civilized indeed. A bartender was serving drinks. Three waitpersons wandered in from the kitchen with trays of tidbits. Exotic little dainties. There was a large fire in the large stone fireplace. That seemed especially right with the nasty weather outside.

Madelaine took Allison to a large chart in a wooden frame hanging on the wall beneath the slope of the stairway to the second floor. It was the perfect spot. Ostentatious—you couldn’t miss it—yet humble—after all, it was tucked under the steps. It was illuminated by LED art lights. Like family trees of the British monarchies, each really important person was in their own little rectangle, with vertical lines from their parents and down to their progeny and horizontal lines to whom they married. The Livingstons came to America—New Netherland—in 1646, with the purchase of 160,000 acres, the southern half of today’s Columbia County. They married Schuylers, who came from the Netherlands in 1650. One of them, Philip Schuyler, was a general in the American Revolution and Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law. They married into the Rensselaer family—the original patroons of the area around Albany—and into the Vanderbilt, Mills, Bayard, and Fulton families. A Livingston financed Robert Fulton’s steamboat.

By then they’d acquired about 1,000,000 acres in upstate New York. They liked large houses and could afford them. Over the next couple of centuries, they built about forty of those mansions along the river. Eleanor Roosevelt was a Livingston. As was George Herbert Walker Bush and, therefore, his son, George W. Bush.

—

Mick McMunchun spotted Allison Leslie Scott, looking so like a middle school girl, across the crowded room.

I had never met him. But I knew instantly who he was. He was, of course, white. Not much of a distinction, everyone in the room was white, except for one woman who looked to be of Asian Indian heritage and one of the girls wandering through with the trays who was a light-skinned African American. What was it about him? He looked like he owned the place. Which he did. He had a slight smirk. I took it to mean that he’d calculated that he was the richest person in the room.

He headed straight for her.

I didn’t want things to happen too quickly. I wanted to string it out. Make him work. Maneuver. I went over to Madelaine, and my niece, Allison, before he could get there. “Allison loves books,” I said. “I’d bet she’d like to meet some of the writers.”