Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It could have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn't, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them – incredibly – just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham's College an hour ago. Not so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he'd noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.