The answer: now that Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, was in London, freed from the monastic constraints of Cambridge, and a full twenty-two years of age, he was able to live, and dress, as he pleased. Today, walking across Charing Cross, he was wearing a suit that appeared to've been constructed by (1) dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot-long sleeves of the most expensive linen; (2) bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms; (3) painting most of him in glue; (4) shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies; and (5) (because King Charles II, who'd mandated, a few years earlier, that all courtiers wear black and white, was getting bored with it, but had not formally rescinded the order) adding dashes of color here and there, primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons – enough ribbon, all told, to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff. The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show off its lacy ends. Louis XIV's Croatian mercenaries, les Cravates, had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris, and the Earl of Upnor, always pushing the envelope, was now doing the cravate thing with a scarf instead of an (as of ten minutes ago) outmoded collar. He had a wig that was actually wider than his shoulders, and a pair of boots that contained enough really good snow-white leather that, if pulled on straight, they would have reached all the way to his groin, at which point each one of them would have been larger in circumference than his waist; but he had of course folded the tops down and then (since they were so long) folded them back up again to keep them from dragging on the ground, so that around each knee was a complex of white leather folds about as wide as a bushel-basket, filled with a froth of lace. Gold spurs, beset with jewels, curved back from each heel to a distance of perhaps eight inches. The heels themselves were cherry-red, four inches high, and protected from the muck of Charing Cross by loose slippers whose flat soles dragged on the ground and made clacking noises with each step. Because of the width of his boot-tops, the Earl had to swing his legs around each other with each step, toes pointed, rolling so violently from side to side that he could only maintain balance with a long, encrusted, beribboned walking-stick.