The stairwell was narrow and dark, and felt a century older than the rest of the church interior. The walls were stone, the steps wooden. Adrian had to move carefully not to trip over himself as he rushed to keep up with Bevil. A handful of narrow twists, and then they reached the top where the stairwell opened into a small room with slatted windows and more stone walls.

In the center of the room was the biggest bell Adrian had ever seen in person, hanging in a rusting, iron frame, attached to a circular wooden mechanism with a heavy rope leading downward, through the floor, into the church proper. Even in the near darkness, the bell was impressive, more so because Adrian knew the details. Over four feet across in diameter, weighing 2,500 pounds, when it rang it could be heard throughout the city. Etched across the top, in clear letters, the name of the man who’d cast and delivered it: Revere.

“He called it the ‘sweetest bell he ever made,’” Bevil said, as they stood in front of the bell. “Died two years after it was hung.”

Adrian didn’t respond. He knew more about Revere, and by extension, this bell, than this church groundskeeper could learn in a lifetime. The bell in front of them had indeed been cast by Paul Revere and hung in King’s Chapel two years before Revere died, at eighty-three. Although the date carved into the bell, near Revere’s name, was the date it was delivered and hung, 1816, Revere had begun molding and casting it two years earlier, when he’d first gotten the order from the church, whose original bell had cracked.

In 1814.

“His last one,” Bevil continued. “He made three hundred of them. Some say he became obsessed with making bells late in life. Had a heck of a business in copper, cannons, armaments, silver, engravings. But all he seemed to care about as he got older were the bells. Kept on making ’em, until this one.”

Adrian was hardly listening to the man. He knew what the textbooks said about the bell in King’s Chapel, that it was Revere’s last and most impressive. What was written in textbooks—and most history books—didn’t matter to Adrian. Most textbooks were flawed, only as valuable as the reputations of those who had penned them. And most people who wrote history were flawed as well, spending their careers in pursuit of elusive acclaim.

Men like Charles.