My poor copy-editor, dealing with London place-names. Fully half the queries on this book go something like this. “St. Laurence Jewry” — do you mean St. Laurence Pountney? “St. Giles Cripplegate” — do you mean St. Giles-in-the-Fields? “Aldgate” — do you mean Aldersgate? No, no, and no. Last book, it was people names instead; she kept double-checking to make sure this Edward whoever was not supposed to be that Edward whoever.

I’m glad she does it, of course. One of these days I will name two St. Laurence parishes when I only mean to name one. And to be fair, it took me a remarkably long time to sort the two St. Gileses from one another, and to figure out where each one was. But the queries amuse me. If this were a secondary-world fantasy, I wouldn’t repeat names half so often as the real world does, precisely because of this confusion.