HE OPENED THE DOOR , trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Holborn, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake's house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre–Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right – as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake's house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London * had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King's armies. There'd been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.