I’ve taken you on ahead of several young men who have bachelor’s degrees, all because of this letter.” King reached under his cape and drew the letter out. “I think you should keep it. A recommendation from such a great man might be of value to you again someday.”

Will took the letter, read it, remembered the day that Knox wrote it.

Then the coach began to slow, and the driver called down to them, “Millbridge comin’ up, gents. MacReady’s Tavern for the night. Good stew, soft beds, and they buy their cornmeal from the Cousins gristmill, where they grind so fine, the Indian puddin’s as smooth as mother’s milk.”

FOUR

“UP AHEAD IS MACREADYS, the old coach stop,” said Peter Fallon. “It’s still a restaurant.”

“Maybe we should have lunch there.” Evangeline Carrington looked at her watch. “Or dinner, we’ve been driving so long.”

“I’m giving you material for your next article, and you’re complaining. Take notes instead. We’re on the George Washington Heritage Highway. The sunroof is open. The autumn colors are glorious. Call it, ‘Route 16: Washington Passed This Way.’ “

“How about, ‘Washington Passed Wind This Way’?”

Peter rolled his eyes and kept driving.

They had met in their twenties, when he had been searching her family’s history for clues to a lost tea set. They had lived together for a time, when he tried teaching history in a midwestern college. They had found each other again in their forties, when each was recovering from a divorce.

This time, it seemed to be working, despite their differences. He came from the neighborhood and had made good selling rarities to the upper crust. She came from the upper crust and didn’t much care. And while they spent more time together than apart, they practiced what experience preached: no sharing of toothpaste or utility bills.

As they went by MacReady’s Family Restaurant, Peter said, “Washington really did pass this way.”

“You don’t know when to quit, do you?”

“If I did, you and I might never have gotten together again.”

“The road not taken … unlike this one.” She looked out at a strip mall, which was followed by a wooded lot on which an old farmhouse was falling to ruin, which was followed by a half-acre of used cars arrayed around a little shack. “Where are we, again?”

“On one of the three main roads to New York back in the eighteenth century, known then as Middle Post Road. Coach left Boston at three a.m. Breakfast in Medfield—”

“Read a magazine and then you’re in—”

“Millbridge, below Uxbridge, where Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island meet.”

“New England’s very own middle of nowhere,” she said.

“Coaches would stop here for the night—”

“You know, Peter—”

She turned to him and a strand of blond hair caught in one of her earrings. She brushed it back, and he thought she looked as good in her forties as she had in her twenties, even when she was about to zing him.

“—sometimes I wonder how you find room in that brain for things like phone numbers and computer passwords, considering all the useless knowledge you’ve stored.”

“Knowledge is never useless. As I always say, history matters. Washington took this route home after his presidential trip to New England—”

“After they gave him the Golden Eagle Tea Set?”

“Which brought us together.”

“Proof that history matters,” she cracked, “more than it should.”

“Washington had come into New England on Upper Post Road,” Peter continued. “He wanted to go back by a different route. But he wouldn’t take Lower Road because it went through Rhode Island, which hadn’t ratified the Constitution—”

“So they were fighting over the Constitution even then,” she said.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same. The lesson of history.”

“Do you really think we’ll be able to repeal this Second Amendment?”

“What do you mean, we?”

“Peter … we’ve been over this already. If you’re against the repeal, you’re against gun control. If you’re against gun control, pull over and let me out.”

Peter fixed his eyes on the road. “We’re looking for the Millbridge Historical Society. It’s in the old Pike-Perkins Mill complex.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“You changed the subject.