184 • The AbyssEven in moments of silence, an unmistakable scent of death hung in the
air. Down at Woolwich, Elizabeth Pepys couldn’t find out whether her par-
ents in Saint Sepulchre were alive or dead. Samuel had never stepped inside
their door, and the messenger he sent to inquire had not come back. On his
own travels back to London, Pepys was struck by the terror etched on
people’s faces: “How few people I see, and those walking like people that had
taken leave of the world.” On another day he was unnerved by their talk:
“But Lord, how everybody’s looks and discourse in the streets is of death and
nothing else.” He was obsessed by his own inability to think of other things.
The death of his doctor, so long after his servant’s passing, had made him
forget what he wanted to do about his bookkeeping. And the plague pits
preyed on his mind in a strange way. He walked toward Moorfields, knowing
the dead were being buried en masse. “God forgive my presumption,” he
murmured. He had been curious “whether I could see any dead Corps going
to the grave, but as God would have it, did not.”^7
Dean Sancroft had been away from Saint Paul’s for two months. In that
time the Destroying Angel’s arrows struck so widely in the cathedral area
that in some places the dead were piled in heaps on the ground before the
buriers eventually took them away. Houses were locked up next to the court
where the dean had lived before going for a rest cure at Tunbridge Wells and
moving on to his brother’s place in Cambridgeshire. The sacristan’s wife had
died of the common disease, and he had fled. John Tillison faithfully smoked
Dean Sancroft’s residence every Tuesday and Thursday, hopeful that even-
tually this plague would end and the dean would return.^8
Samuel Pepys tried unsuccessfully to block out the sound. “Little noise
heard day nor night but tolling of bells,” he informed Lady Carteret. Alder-
man Turner was too occupied with public business at the Guildhall to pay at-
tention to the bells of Saint Gregory’s or, if he was conscious of the noise, he
did not say. Across London Bridge, John Allin stared from the window of his
rented rooms. Neither he nor the family with whom he boarded had come
down sick, but the sights and sounds were unnerving. “I am, through mercy,”
he wrote, “yet well in the middest of death. And that, too approaching neerer
and neerer, not many doores of[f ], and the pitt open dayly within view of my
chamber window. The Lord fitt me and all of us for our last end.”^9
Reverend Patrick was only too aware of the rising mounds in his church-
yard, and his mood was mournful. The only topics of conversation, he wrote
Mrs. Gauden, were the plague and death. “I can reflect on nothing so sadly
as to be separate from my friends, and not so much as bid them farewell if I
dye.” The church bells at Saint Paul Covent Garden had pealed their sad