130 • Confusionin the weekly Bills of Mortality. In mid-August, the city parishes started
burying their dead at day as well as night. The mayor warned householders
to stay indoors after 9 :00 p.m.; shut-up households were being allowed to go
out to get a breath of fresh air—and presumably to keep them from breaking
out of their homes at other times. As the bill for the last week of the month
was being prepared, Pepys chanced upon Saint Olave Hart Street’s clerk and
asked how the plague went in the parish. The clerk replied candidly, “There
died nine this week, though I returned but six.”^35
For the first time, Pepys expressed his deep fear. “I am as well as can be,”
he wrote hopefully. “When I come to be alone, I do not eat in time nor
enough, nor with any good heart.” His thoughts turned to making out a
will—twice: “for my father and my wife.” He finally admitted the truth: “A
man cannot depend upon living two days to an end.” Relieved to be in a
“much better state of soul” if he died suddenly, Pepys turned to the unpleas-
ant prospect of moving his papers to the temporary headquarters his supe-
riors had arranged at Greenwich. The new venue “by no means pleases me,”
he wrote, “being in the heart of all the labourers and workmen there, which
makes it as unsafe as... London.”^36
Samuel Pepys drifted off to sleep dreaming of an erotic encounter with
Lady Castlemaine, the king’s mistress. Waking to the real world, he told
himself it was but a dream. Yet he fell back to musing on the following day:
“What a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shake-
speere resembles it), we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this—
that then we should not need to be so fearful of death as we are in this
plague-time.” It was an interesting twist to Hamlet’s soliloquy on dying.^37
Pepys reached the end of August far less sanguine than he had been the
month before. “Thus this month ends with great sadness upon the public,”
he admitted. The contagion was now “everywhere through the Kingdom al-
most.” Twice he had come upon plague-infected bodies: once in the dark of
night as he climbed the stairs from the riverbank to his London home, and
the other time in an open coffin he passed on foot between Greenwich and
Woolwich. The sight of a body being taken from a ketch at Deptford trig-
gered mournful thoughts about his physician, Dr. Burnet, who had died after
surviving his home quarantine. Pepys was so unnerved by these thoughts
that he forgot to take care of business at the office. “Everyone’s looks and dis-
course on the street is of death and nothing else,” he noted. He made his fi-
nal preparations to move in with Elizabeth and the maids at Woolwich to be
near the Navy Board’s temporary Greenwich headquarters.
The death toll rose relentlessly. “In the city died this week 7496 ; and of