“You think a historian can understand the tenor of the present moment better than the men living through it?” Matthew’s eyebrow cocked up in open skepticism. “Yes,” I said, bristling. “We often do.” “That’s not what you said this morning when you couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any forks in the house,” he observed. It was true that I’d searched high and low for twenty minutes before Pierre gently broke it to me that the utensils were not yet common in England.
