Jack lay in the Press-Room in the center of the prison, on the second floor. Next door was the Women Felons’ hold, which contained about a hundred females packed head to foot like chocolate soldiers in a box. Their sole source of diversion was to scream the most foul things they could think of out a grate set into the stone wall at one end of the room, communicating with the street. And as it turned out there were plenty of free Londoners who had nothing better to do than to stand out there and listen to them. As this practice had been continuously practiced and maintained on this spot for something like one thousand years, with only occasional lapses attributable to plague, fire, gaol-fever, or wholesale tear-downs and re-builds of the prison fabrique itself, it had been developed to a high art. To blaspheming, these women were what the Duke of Marlborough was to generalship. Fortunately for Jack, who liked a bit of quiet so that he might lapse into unconsciousness from time to time, the Press-Room walls were thick, and muffled those execrations into a vague clamor.