122 • ConfusionBy the end of June, the pesthouse was painfully overcrowded, as whole
families joined solitary souls. Some people were fortunate, among them
Katherine Fennel, who escaped the fate of the rest of her family. She re-
mained at the facility with weekly rations until released on August 14. Later
she was paid for nursing. By the end of the calendar year, nearly three thou-
sand indigent residents of Saint Margaret’s had been buried at the parish’s
expense.
Like a stealthy shadow the infection moved on from its dismal entry
points to equally unattractive Saint Stephen’s Alley, Bowling Alley, Mill
Bank, Horseferry Banke, Tuttle Street, and Smyths Alley. In July the inevita-
ble happened: The great yards and broad streets, on the one hand, and the
congested lanes and alleys where the poor dwelt, on the other, became an in-
terlocking network of contagion. Oddly enough, this development brought
new hope as well as death, especially on King Street. Its fifty-seven house-
holders had been assessed substantial poor-tax sums, and forty-nine met
their assessment. Most of them had undoubtedly fled, but word of the
plague’s ever-increasing toll followed them, and they sent money back. A
similar response came from the absentees of Dean’s Yard. Dr. Busby, who had
transported his Westminster School boys to safety in the country, paid fif-
teen pounds to his parish and added twenty pounds for a surgeon’s services
to the infected poor.
All told, Saint Margaret’s two churchwardens gathered in more than
£ 1 , 650 this year, with gifts accounting for £ 1 , 117. These receipts almost cov-
ered expenditures for the infected poor, which totaled £ 1 , 715. The churchwar-
dens advanced the difference, expecting to be reimbursed when the parish
returned to normal. Even these figures masked the enormity of the under-
taking. Wealthy householders who lost family members to plague sometimes
made donations, in addition to their own burial fees, to cover simple burials
for hundreds of poorer persons. This separate budget showed an income of
£132 19s. 6 d. Another truly touching entry states that Robert Crosse left £ 1
13 s. 7. 5 d. at his death to the parish for care of his two children. It was ob-
viously all he had left, right down to the last halfpenny; he had been unable
to pay his own burial fee.^18
As the crisis deepened, the two churchwardens, Richard Arnold and
Nicholas Upton, struggled to keep a semblance of sanity and order. A sur-
vival of the spirit at work here can be measured by the peers’ donated pounds
and by an elderly man’s offering of bodices, stockings, and shoes for two lit-
tle girls at the pesthouse whose mother had died there destitute. The church-