“In fact,” Charles continued, “Revere was pretty much a failure at battle. Court-martialed in 1779 and dishonorably discharged after a botched siege of a British fort in Maine—the most disastrous battle in the Revolutionary War—that left most of his battalion killed or captured.”

“But that’s not how he’s remembered,” she said.

Charles sipped the coffee again. His smile returned, because now they were solidly on his turf.

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

“Right, the poem. Longfellow, right? The British are coming.”

“Revere certainly had the best PR of any of the Revolutionary heroes,” Charles said, repeating a line he’d used, sometimes successfully drawing a laugh, when he’d taught a freshman core class to undergraduates on the period, “but most of what people think they know about Paul Revere, and his famous midnight ride, is completely wrong.”

“He didn’t ride his horse across Boston, warning the people that the British were attacking?”

“It wasn’t his horse, and no, he wasn’t warning the people of Boston of an impending attack. And most of his ride took place outside of Boston, on the way to Concord and Lexington. He also took the first part of his journey—across the Charles River—by boat, and he wasn’t alone, there were three riders working together. And during the ride, Paul Revere was actually captured by the British, roughed up a bit, and then released.”

She tapped the computer screen with a red fingernail.

“This paper goes a lot deeper than that.”

So she had read that much, at least. For some reason, Charles got the immediate and strange feeling that she was humoring him, getting him to expound on information she already knew. He realized that he’d never actually asked her what she did for a living, or who, really, she was. In fact, he wasn’t sure he even knew her name. Something that started with a P, but he was afraid to make an attempt, considering what they’d already done together—the lipstick on his pillow. In all of that, he felt so awkward, so unsteady; so, he stuck to the arena he knew best.

“That’s correct. The true reason behind that midnight ride. But before we can even begin to understand what Revere was really up to, we need to understand who the man actually was.”

The woman hit the mouse with her other hand, and then tapped the lines of text in the first paragraph of his paper.

“His family was French; his father owned a silver shop. Revere was a craftsman, a silver worker. One of the most technically gifted of his era. He also worked at dentistry, but he probably didn’t make George Washington’s wooden teeth.”