In the bright light of day, Adrian was fully aware of the image he projected, from the cycling clothes to his tanned and Nautilus-shaped form, to the ringlets and waves of that expertly coiffed hair. He knew that many of his students, and a fair portion of the other professors at Tufts—not just in the department of history but throughout the humanities—often used terms like “dandy” when they thought he was out of earshot; but other people’s opinions had never bothered him. Perhaps it was his severe upbringing at the hands of his scientist parents, but he’d never had patience for the opinions of fools or rivals; in fact, the only thing he disliked more than unsolicited opinions were flights of intellectual fancy.

Which explained his current mood, as he stared up at the Georgian facade of the mostly granite building that took up much of the block, where School and Tremont streets meet. To be sure, King’s Chapel, the oldest continuously used religious site in Boston and one of the oldest churches in America, was familiar to Adrian, a place he’d visited many times. As a scholar who’d dedicated much of his adult life to eighteenth-century American history, it would have been impossible for him to avoid such a high-profile location, favored by a multitude of Revolutionary War figures, many of whom were entombed in the building’s catacombs, or buried in the plot of land directly adjacent to it; those heroes that were not on the grounds of the church were interred right across the street, in the Granary Burying Ground, even more popular with tourists and history buffs. But on this particular afternoon, Adrian could think of a dozen places he’d rather be than in this grand, old church.

In two hours, he was supposed to be giving a lecture to an auditorium full of freshmen about Paul Revere’s role in the Boston Tea Party, one of the most famous—and much misunderstood—episodes of the Revolutionary period. Adrian didn’t enjoy lecturing freshmen; he didn’t really like undergraduates as a breed and was much happier lodged in his office or in one of the university’s many libraries, working on his research projects. But even standing in front of a crowded hall filled with bored, core requirement–obsessed teenagers who’d chosen a course on the Revolution because they’d thought they’d be hearing about musket battles and cannonballs, instead of taxation issues and harbor-docking rights, was preferable to his current absurd adventure—a mission necessitated by the fanciful speculations of an academic competitor.