For the first few months after the capsule had been opened, Charles had spoken of nothing else but that silver plate. And then, strangely, he’d gone silent about it and had never even mentioned it in passing, not once. Now, Adrian understood. Because he was certain that the picture in his hands was of that same plate—except it had been cut in two, sliced lengthwise, opened like the pages of a book. Adrian had no idea how Charles could have gotten permission to do such a thing; no doubt, he’d done it in secret. But that didn’t matter now, not only because Charles was dead but because inside the silver plate, he’d found a second engraving. And the import of this engraving far eclipsed the first.

Not words, this time, but an image. Adrian could easily identify the man pictured in the engraving: Paul Revere, as he would have appeared near the end of his life. In front of Revere, across what appeared to be the floor of a workshop or metal factory, sat a dozen wineglasses, in a perfect row. Each of the wineglasses appeared to be filled halfway with liquid. And at the very edge of the engraving, beyond the last glass, sat a large bell. Vibration patterns had been carved around the bell—clearly meant to symbolize that the bell was ringing. And Revere, at the other end of the line of wineglasses, was just as clearly making notations. Looking closer, Adrian could see that beneath each glass, Revere had etched a number. And beneath it all—Revere, the glasses, the bell—appeared a date.

A date that didn’t make any sense.

1814

Adrian knew, the time capsule had originally been buried in the cornerstone of the State House in 1795. It hadn’t been reopened until 1855, and then reburied until modern times. The date on this engraving implied that sometime after 1795, but before Revere’s death in 1818, he had surreptitiously replaced the original silver plate with a second plate, containing this bizarre self-portrait. Not impossible—in fact, Revere, as the top metallurgist and mechanic of his time, and the only person in the Americas who had figured out the art of working with copper sheeting—had been commissioned to replate the State House’s dome as late as 1803, and would have had easy access to the cornerstone. But the question remained—why? What did this engraving mean? And what was so important about the picture—the wineglasses, that bell, the numerical notations—that Revere would have wanted it so artfully hidden and preserved?