200 • The Abyssnow. “What is the matter,” he objected, “that you make such a long apology
in your last letter about my not coming: It is enough that I am well, and to
heare that you are so... I pray God preserve you and bring you and all your
relations together againe.”
Next she suggested he consider crossing the river to Surrey during the
week and returning for Sunday services. “But if I should go,” he replied, “why
would you have mee to be at Clapham, when my brother is so neare [at Bat-
tersea] and you are not there?” Brushing aside her argument that his life was
special, he shot back almost indignantly, “Am I better than another?” He
would stay with his flock except for rare day-visits to his brother’s place.^6
Elizabeth watched in dismay as the weekly toll in the metropolis ap-
proached ten thousand. The infection had spread along the south bank of the
Thames around the archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, threat-
ening Clapham and Battersea. She knew it was less safe than ever for her to
return home, and she felt remorse for playing on Symon’s heartstrings with
talk of his escaping his parish’s poisoned air.
By October the danger was more immediate. Brentwood’s fashionable
inns and other conveniences on the Roman road had attracted more than the
usual traffic of Londoners, and plague had come with them. Before the year’s
end the infection would carry away 70 persons in Brentwood and 110 at
nearby Romford.
The epidemic swept on through Essex, devastating its thriving cloth-
making communities. A few miles from Brentwood in Bishop Gauden’s first
parish at Bocking, the church bell tolled for a hundred burials or more week
after week until the epidemic finally ended in December 1666. A faded me-
morial in the adjacent town of Braintree remains to this day a mute witness
to a similar tragedy: only 63 of the town’s 284 households escaped the De-
stroying Angel. In these twin communities, more than one thousand women,
men, and children perished of an estimated population of three thousand.
The mortality rate was close to two times that of London.^7
The two Mrs. Gaudens were captive residents as the raging distemper
closed in on Brentwood. The local authorities hastily threw up a makeshift
pesthouse near an inn that served as the postal office. A fatality in the pest-
house and the spread of the sickness into several parts of the town put a sud-
den halt to Elizabeth’s correspondence with Symon; she dared not endanger
a servant’s life by sending him to the posting place until the area was clear of
the infection.
Patience had never been one of Elizabeth’s strong points. It seemed an
eternity since she had been with old friends in Clapham. She prayed for the