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wooden cradle. The woman turned as he stepped into the room, her young face round and florid, her arms bare and reddened from scrubbing the sodden clothes by which she earned her starvation wages as a street-laundress.
    'Oh, God!' she cried, lifting the child in its linen shirt, holding it to her. 'Don't hurt us! Whoever you are, don't harm us.'
    ‘I 'm Jack Rann,' said Handsome Jack, sinking down on a plain rush chair, 'and I'm hurt worse than you could ever imagine. Help me, if you can. I've come this far, over the prison roofs. If I'm caught now, I must die on Monday. Let God be my judge, I never in my life did harm to any man or woman. But I won't be taken now, not if I have to die for it.'
    She stared at him. She wanted to believe him, he could see that in her eyes, so that she might be sure of her own safety. There was a square of tarnished glass behind her which served as a mirror. Rann caught sight of himself, the grotesque figure of a make-believe murdered ghost from the stage of the Hoxton Britannia. A dozen downward paths of blood from his upstretched hands had streaked his face and matted his hair. His torn shirt-front was splattered red.
    'The spikes on the wall,' he said quietly. 'That's what drew the blood. I want nothing from you. I must get to the street, that's all. I mean you no harm.'
    'But not to the street like that,' she said. 'You'll be seen and took first thing.'
    She still doubted him but must have seen how much greater his fear was than hers.
    'Then how?' he asked.
    The young woman shook her head.
    'There's only what you see us wearing and the linen in the basket.'
    Jack Rann looked about him and knew that she spoke the truth. Apart from the clothes she wore in her poverty, there was nothing but the laundered linen and no other room but this.
    'Soot,' he said suddenly, 'let me have soot from the grate.'
    He stepped to the hearth with its dead coals and the woman drew back a little, holding the child more firmly. Rann put his blood-streaked hands into the hearth and felt the searing coarseness of the black grit. He smeared his face and hair, his shirt and arms, until they shone with it, his eyes gleaming like the whites of boiled eggs, their sockets pale through the mask of blackened skin.
    'Which way?' he asked.
    Still holding the child, she led him down the stairs into a cobbled yard at the rear of the warehouse. At one end, was an archway. Beyond it he saw market-carts and a coster-girl selling apples from a basket.
    Rann looked at her for the last time.
    ‘I got nothing to give you. One day, I'll thank you, though. I don't know how, but I swear I will.'
    She gazed at him, still doubtfully, and at last said, 'God bless you, poor stranger.'
    Before he could reply, she turned and went quickly back to the stairs. Jack Rann walked, blackened and barefoot, towards the arch. He was now indistinguishable by his face or clothes from ten thousand men of his kind in the city.
    The crowds almost obscured the market-barrows of the fruit-sellers and the fish-merchants along either pavement. A woman was singing for coppers outside a tap-room at the far corner, 'The Bird in Yonder Cage Confined'. Rann took it as an omen. Cabs, carts, and twopenny buses moved in a slow procession at the centre of the road.
    The noise of the city, after so many weeks in the silence of his cell, almost overpowered him with jubilation. Now it was time to plan. He wiped the soot from his moist palms over his face for good measure and slippe d quietly along Newgate Street.
    5
    'Eight a penny! Lumping pears!'
    An old coster in a moleskin jacket and wide-awake hat laughed in his face at the startled eyes in the blackened skin.
    Rann moved between the barrows and the stalls that fringed the butchers' slabs of Newgate Market, his bare feet raw on the paving-grit. He watched the congested traffic, edging from Snow Hill to Cheapside. To one side was a counter of pickled whelks, like huge snails floating in saucers of brine. On the other,