Adrian shivered with disgust as he reached into the backpack and withdrew the bulging sheaf of papers in a manila envelope, in much the same state as he’d found the damn thing, in the mailbox in his office that very morning. “Absurd” was the right word for it; when he’d first opened the envelope and read the cover title, he’d nearly tossed the entire thing into the nearest receptacle:

The Most Amazing Paul Revere Discovery in History

Adrian shook his head at the audacity of such a title; but the subject line paled in comparison to the audacity of Charles Walker’s thesis. Amazingly, Charles had not been exaggerating in the tavern—his paper was incredible—and absurd—and insane. The only thing that had kept Adrian from mulching it immediately were the exhibits attached at the end. Because once Adrian had finally gotten through all those pages of fantasy, speculation, nay, science fiction, he’d finally made his way to the attachments. Charles’s discoveries, his evidence. And to be fair, as absurd as the entire project appeared, those discoveries, well, they weren’t simply absurd.

They were maddening. And worse—maybe true.

Adrian’s gaze shifted from the envelope back to King’s Chapel. First to the columns, because they were impossible to ignore. Then higher, to the rectangle of stone with the arched Palladian windows, rising above the congested midday traffic. No steeple—the original builders had hoped for one, had even drawn up plans, but a financial squeeze had left them with just enough for the granite “tower.” Dreams, as they often were, overmatched by reality.

Adrian’s attention moved back to the envelope in his hands.

Maddening. Because it appeared Charles’s fever dreams, in this instance, had somehow overcome reality.

Adrian shook his head, that mane of ringlets flashing in the sun. He and Charles had never had anything close to a good relationship. Given the differences in their personalities, they could never even agree to disagree about the arcane details of their shared intellectual focus. Even before this new, wild thesis, Charles had always been drawn to the fanciful and the fantastic. Adrian had often suggested the buffoon should have found his way to Hollywood, rather than the hallowed halls of Harvard. Leave it to the masses to picture Paul Revere as a swaggering, near mythical character; as a scholar, Adrian had always believed his duty was to reveal Revere as the man he really was—a slightly pathetic warrior, but a brilliant metallurgist, engraver, and technologist. In Revere’s own words, a mechanic.