176 • The Abysswere still trying to carry on their businesses. Pepys endeavored to satisfy his
own creditors “about bills of exchange” drawn on Tangier’s profits, “but it is
only words,” he admitted, for he had no public money nor could he get it.^43
How did the city keep functioning? On the first Tuesday of October, the
parish clerks of London tallied the previous week’s fatalities. Pepys was al-
ready unnerved, having just learned that two watermen who used to carry
the navy office’s letters and who had been well the previous Saturday had
now been stricken. The plague, he heard, was far from over: A London mer-
chant with an eleven-hearth city home brought the news of the bill to Pepys.
Although the overall bill was down, “it encreases at our end of the town
still.”^44 When would it be over?