He does not recognize any one person in particular, but London, as an entire thing, is as familiar to him as the faces in a parish church, on Sunday morn, would be to an aged vicar. Groups are recognizable too. There’s a battalion of fishwives, of approximately regimental size, who have outflanked the artillery batteries at the Bridge and, by a covert march along Chick Lane, worked their way round to the west bank of the Fleet. There they seem to have divided into companies and squads, and mustered themselves within striking-distance in such places as Saffron Hill, the Dyers’ Court, the Plough-Yard, and Bleeding Heart Court. These are tributaries that empty into Holbourn along the hill that climbs up from the Fleet crossing, where the Hanging-March is doomed to move slowly. Triggered by the westward-propagating Mobb-roar, the fishwives mount vicious sallies from their nests and burst into the road, shouldering between the pikemen and the dragoons, pulling fistfuls of black coins from their aprons and flinging them at Jack’s head. They pock the sledge like grapeshot, they ricochet and ring in the air like færy-bells. Jack rips a button from his coat and underhands it to a fishwife who has actually penetrated to within a few yards of the sledge. She’s too astonished to do anything but clap it out of the air. A knot of fish-guts strikes him square on the bridge of the nose. He returns fire with another golden button.