LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS , bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter's home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers – not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done. * They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely out-moded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.