This is the memory palace. I'm Nate de Mayo.

The cable said that her husband was dead. It had come while she was getting her hair done,

shampooed just before. Or it had come while she was walking back in the February air, hustling

home to get ready for the party. The usual crew, the friends who had been keeping your company

all these months while her husband was away. And now there was a cable that said the

bill was dead. There had been nothing in his letters, no reason to worry. He'd been so

upbeat, even as the expedition had been held up in Shanghai, snared in the typical

tangle of permits and payoffs. Bill's letters had been so positive. He said they'd be

leaving for the band before us to no time.

The cable didn't say how her husband had died. Neither did his obituary. A big one in the

New York Times. Befitting the sign of a wealthy family long familiar to readers of the

paper's Society page, William Hunter Harkness was a handsome Harvardman turned explorer, which

was a type of guy there in the early 1930s. Bill was famous for bringing the Komodo dragon back

from the wilds of Indonesia to frighten children at the Bronx Zoo. To comfort their parents,

that the dark corners of the world were tameable by handsome white Harvardman like Bill Harkness.

They had read in the papers about his wedding to Ruth McCombs, who'd arrived in New York

unannounced. No pedigree, no title. The daughter of a carpenter and a seamstress from Titus

ville, Pennsylvania, who'd fallen in love with the wider world through books and maps and

set out to see it. First to college in Colorado, then teaching English in Cuba, before landing

in Manhattan with no particular plan in the middle of the jazz age. She charmed her way into

a job as a dress designer at one of the biggest fashion houses in the city. She made fabulous

friends. She was no great beauty. She would tell you that herself. But she was brash and

...