Chapter One

I saw my first dead body when I was nine years old.

That sounds scary, but oddly enough, it didn’t feel that way at the time—something about the resilience of childhood, I expect.

We’d gone to Algeria for my father to take celestial measurements in the Sahara, and one day the local expat group asked him to accompany a doctor going to see a woman in a village outside of town—she was an American, they said, and would be reassured by the presence of other Americans.

We went along with him because my mother wanted to, and that was back in the good days, the days before she started having serious conversations with the bust of Shakespeare in the front hall of our mansion in Boston’s Back Bay.

My family members each embrace obsession in their own way. My younger brother Martin went so mad for God he had to become a priest—albeit an Episcopal one, so he can still enjoy some of the finer things in life. My father, following a patriarchal tradition of obsessive eccentricities, devotes his life to stargazing—and traveling to stargaze—while my older brother Phillip turned those same stars into scientific objects and spends his days teaching astrophysics. And my mother… well, the less said about my mother, some days, the better.

I expect we each have something terribly wrong with us.

So my parents and I went along the bumpy track in the Land Rover, with the doctor explaining that she’d been screaming, the American woman, something about great birds blotting out the sun. Ergot poisoning, he added. It happens.

By the time we arrived, the woman had died, and there was fear still etched in her face, fear of those dark wings she’d seen in the sky. Memorable. And so I saw my first body when I was nine.

 I wonder, now, if that meant anything, pointed me in a direction I didn’t even know I was taking, that would be revealed only once I went to Nepal.

***

The visitor came soon after I was contemplating the dispiriting contents of my refrigerator.

I periodically go on diets, and the first step in any diet is clearing out anything remotely delicious from your kitchen. And then, of course, that first night finds you staring at a hard-boiled egg, a can of tomato juice, some healthy-looking grain, and an apple that’s seen better days.

I pulled up the online delivery menu from The Q, my favorite local Chinese restaurant. I could go back to the diet tomorrow.

So when the buzzer rang downstairs, I flung the door open with enthusiasm achieved only by a person who’s been dieting for a full eight hours. Instead of the delivery guy with a bag full of goodies, however, I was looking at a slightly older-than-middle-aged woman in an anorak with the hood up.

“Yes?”

She sniffed, wiping an errant snowflake from her cheek. “Are you Abigail Bradford?”

“Yes,” I said automatically. “Can I help you?”

The gray eyes looked me over, shrewd, intelligent, and extremely thorough. I wondered what she made of what she saw, because I can be a little startling at first: a tall youngish woman, chin-length hair currently an experimental vivid blue, brown eyes behind glasses. “You answered my post,” she said calmly.

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“My post,” she repeated, exasperation creeping into her voice. “I put a post up on the intranet. At Harvard.”

At that moment the dinner delivery arrived, the driver impatiently shouldering past her. “Here you go.”

I had the tip ready. “Thanks,” I said, grabbing the food and hoping this woman would take the hint and leave.

“Well,” she said, eyeing the bag, “you’ll want to get to your dinner.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

She stepped forward. “So let’s get inside. There’s supposed to be heavy snow after midnight.” She caught my eye. “Well, of course I won’t be staying past midnight,” she said. “But with the timing of things—well, I wanted to do the interview as soon as possible. Of course.”

Interview?

The wind was screaming down Acorn Street—the most-photographed street in Boston is also one of the narrowest, a perfect wind tunnel—and my dinner was getting cold. I gave up and let her in.

Five minutes later we were sitting rather cozily in my living room, her coat and hat hung up in the hall, fire blazing merrily along, boxes of fragrant Chinese food between us. “You’re sure you don’t want anything?” I asked for about the third time. I am nothing if not polite, even to people who are clearly off their rockers.

“No, no, you go ahead, dear,” she said, fluffing the pillow beside her, settling in. Seen in the light, she had no-nonsense, short salt-and-pepper hair, with lots of laugh wrinkles around her gray eyes.

Nothing distracted, however, from the sharpness in those eyes.

“Since your memory is clearly failing you,” she said, “I’ll remind you. I’m Emma Caulfield. I put up an ad for a research assistant to go with me to Nepal.”

I’d just opened the chopsticks packet. “Nepal?”

“Well, yes, of course, Nepal,” she said, frowning. “Really, dear, do you usually repeat what people say to you? Do you want the job, or not?”

I put everything down. There was a glimmer of an idea at the back of my mind. Harvard perforce means Phillip, and this was exactly something Phillip would think was funny. “I have a feeling my brother answered your post on my behalf,” I said carefully.

She was unfazed. “Then he must have known you’d want the job.”

“Going to Nepal.”

She nodded. “Going to Nepal.”

I thought about it. It wasn’t actually totally insane. My brothers and I are that most hated of species, trust-fund babies, and Phillip and I have spent a substantial part of our inheritances collecting academic letters after our names, probably to prove something to someone… well, I’ve never quite worked that part out. I was into the second year of holding my doctorate in history, and hadn’t yet found any work in academia. Boston and Cambridge might together be the hub of higher education, but even lectureships are harder and harder to come by, and guarded jealously.

And—here’s the thing—truth be told, I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I didn’t actually want a career in higher education. I liked the research part: I liked being a detective, figuring out what really happened, the story behind the story preserved for posterity. Learning about people who weren’t just stick-figures, real people who lived and loved and breathed and should be remembered. Bringing them back to life, somehow, if only on paper.

Teaching… yeah, maybe not so much. Faculty interactions, definitely not. And while it’s true I’d never need to work for a living, that didn’t mean I didn’t actually want to. To contribute to the world in some way. I just wasn’t yet seeing how.

All that meant, of course, was there wasn’t anything tying me to Boston at the moment.

“What,” I asked, “are you going to Nepal for?”

“Well, research, of course, dear.” She looked puzzled. “I thought that would be obvious.” I didn’t say anything, and she sighed gustily. “I’m Emma Caulfield,” she said again.

“Yes, I got that part.”

“I’m a writer.”

I continued to stare blankly at her, and she started looking annoyed. “I write historical romances,” she said. “I’m on the New York Times bestseller list.”

And there it was. I hadn’t heard of her for good reason: I subscribe to the academic historian’s dim view of historical fiction in general, and historical romances in particular. It’s an automatic judgment we make: slipshod research, damsels in distress, Regency dresses. I met her eyes. “Bodice-rippers,” I suggested, nodding.

To my surprise, she laughed. “Well, good for you, Abigail Bradford,” she said. “I was starting to think you didn’t have any gumption at all.”

There it was again, that sharp mind behind those eyes. “You fraud,” I said slowly. “You knew I’d react like that.”

Emma nodded. She looked thoroughly satisfied. “I am researching my next novel,” she said crisply. “I am going to Kathmandu, and then on to some trekking. I’m planning on getting up to Everest Base Camp, and I certainly don’t want to do that alone.” Her expression dared me to say anything. “I’m good at asking questions, and taking in the scenery, and all that. But I’m not always able to organize what I’m doing, and this time around I need some specialist help. I want you to help research what it was like for people on the mountain, people in the country, people in the world, in the early nineteen-twenties.”

She paused, and a trace of something vulnerable slipped into her voice. “I also need someone to—well, to go with me. I used to like traveling on my own, have done it for years, but not so much anymore. There’s too much to keep track of, and I need to be thinking and writing. So I need someone to go with me.”

“As a researcher,” I said.

She didn’t meet my eyes. “I’ve never done this before,” she confessed. “I’ve always done everything on my own. But this time feels different—and I’m not about to get a reputation for slipshod work, so I need some help. Some research, some organizing, some travel… and someone to tell me when I’m going off in the wrong direction. That’s why I need a historian—you.”

Not just any historian: me. I’d remember that, later. “You’re looking for facts?” I asked sweetly. “That must be a first for a romance novelist.”

“Historical romance novelist,” she corrected. Her eyes were steely. “So are you in, or what?”

I had a feeling I was going to regret this. “I’m in,” I said. “And now, can we eat?”

***

I Googled her, of course. The moment she was out the door.

Emma Caulfield, it transpired, was indeed a Big Name in the genre. She’d been writing novels for the past thirty-odd years. She’d been part of the big Regency romance movement, had switched things around for a while with an American Colonial period, even set a small series in prehistoric Britain.

And she was right: her novels were consistently on the bestseller list. She must be making a fortune.

“The romance bestseller list,” I reminded my friend Justine when I told her about the late-night visit. We were still deep in February, and we’d come off the ice-skating at Boston Common to the warmth of my fireplace, a pot of tea, and a bag of popcorn.

“You know,” Justine said, stretching out a leg toward the heat, “you could manage to be just a little more judgmental if you tried.”

“Do you think?” I smiled and refilled her tea. I was only half-serious.

“What I think,” she said carefully, “is that you might be surprised. Romance novels have come a long way since the oh, John, oh, Mary days.”

“And you would know this, how?”

She laughed. “Come on, Abbie. Sex and the City changed everything. There are feminist romances now. And your Emma Caulfield—she has a good reputation. I think she might surprise you, I really do. God, I think my toes are finally thawing.” She slanted a look at me. “So you’re going with her? To Kathmandu?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“You know, you don’t have to, just because Phillip had one of his harebrained ideas.”

“Trouble is,” I said slowly, “he’s usually right, and it actually sounds like it could be fun. And… interesting. The work, the travel, the research—there’s a goal, you know? Something that might mean something.”

She nodded, her eyes on the flames. Justine knows about my past. Phillip and Martin and I are the thirteenth generation of an old, old Massachusetts family: check it out, the first governor of what would eventually become the Commonwealth was named Bradford, he was on the Mayflower that first miserable winter in Provincetown and Plymouth. Later, during the Gilded Age, the Bradfords became rich beyond understanding, though they had one saving grace—philanthropy. Hospitals, learning institutions, the arts … my ancestors helped build the knowledge-based economy that still characterizes Boston.

I have an ambivalent relationship with my family wealth—well, to be fair, with much of my family itself, too—and am always looking for ways to put it to good use; I’m not interested in a trust fund that does nothing but increase itself. I give away a lot of money, in a whole lot of ways, and that’s good, that’s important… but I’d like to be doing something important, too. I just hadn’t yet figured out what.

“So what’s the plan?” Justine asked. “What exactly is she researching?”

I shut my eyes; I can nearly always visualize conversations when I do. “She’s doing something about an Everest expedition back in the 1920s,” I said. “There was an Englishman called George Mallory who went up and didn’t come down, and there’s controversy about whether he reached the summit or not, which is an important question among mountaineers.” I paused. “And apparently he was incredible eye-candy, as was his wife, so maybe it’s a love story between them.” I found I was smiling. Okay, so maybe there was something more to romance novels than I’d assumed. “She wants me to go to Kathmandu ahead of her, and she’ll join me after she’s done some sort of conference in New York.”

“Well, it sounds exotic anyway,” said Justine. “Why not? It might be just what you need while you decide what you’re going to do with your life.”

That was, of course, the question. “I’m intrigued,” I admitted. “Phillip was right. It sounds exotic, it sounds interesting, and it’s the other side of the world.”

“Top of the world,” said Justine. “Everest’s the highest mountain on Earth.”

“I’m not actually climbing Everest,” I reminded her.

“No,” she conceded. “You’d need to be a little more of an Outdoors Girl for that. Still, it might lead to other things.”

“Like what?” I asked suspiciously.

Justine grinned. “Romance?” she suggested.

I threw the popcorn at her.