Eliza had come to London in February, and on the strength of personal recommendations from Leibniz and Huygens, she had talked her way into a Royal Society meeting – one of the few women ever to attend one, unless you counted Freaks of Nature brought in to display their multiple vaginas or nurse their two-headed babies. Daniel had escorted the Countess of Zeur into Gresham's College a bit nervously, fearing that she'd make a spectacle of herself, or that the Fellows would get the wrong idea and use her as a subject for vivisection. But she had dressed and behaved modestly and all had gone well. Later Daniel had taken her out to Willesden to meet Sterling, with whom she gotten along famously. Daniel had known they would; six months earlier both had been commoners, and now they strolled in what was to become Sterling's French garden, deciding where the urns and statues ought to go, and compared notes as to which shops were the best places to buy old family heirlooms.