Excerpt

Chapter One

Some revolutions begin with the gunpowder sonnets of cannon fire, others with the fiery words of tyrannical men. This one began with a middle-aged gentleman wandering the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia in his knickers—and nothing else.

Ben Franklin and I had been called to investigate, not because half-naked mid-level functionaries of the Custom Hall were particularly interesting to the pair of us, or because he'd broken into a Quaker family's home on an idyllic spring afternoon and was caught trying to put on the oldest daughter's beige dress and petticoat. What drew us was the way the man's memory had been cleaved like an apple struck with a saber, suggesting an air of sorcery.

"You say he has no knowledge of what happened to him?" asked Ben with that familiar twinkle in his eye.

The horrified wife, one Harriet Cooper, tugged on the neckline of her muslin gown and glanced at her husband, who was slurping porridge in the other room at the dining table. Her brow knotted and raised, then bunched in the middle with a concern that bordered on exasperation.

"He still thinks it's 1798," she said, then raised her voice. "That was two years ago."