The Awakening • 247When the parish of Saint Olave Hart Street recorded only one death for
the week, Elizabeth Pepys decisively orchestrated a return home. Her hus-
band’s erotic adventures were on the increase again, and yet he energetically
took part in her move back to Seething Lane. On the second of December,
she settled back in their London apartment. He returned to Greenwich,
where much of his business was still centered, while planning to see her as
often as possible. Two weeks later, after one of their reunions, Samuel trium-
phantly paid all his outstanding bills with the help of his goldsmiths and
treasury officials. He had also steered thousands of pounds from the royal
coffers to his victualing superior Denis Gauden and arranged for Denis’s
older sons (stepsons to Elizabeth Gauden) to join the navy victualer’s staff. If
Denis should fall to the plague, his wife would be protected, much to the re-
lief of the Gaudens and their old friend Symon Patrick.^6
Elizabeth Pepys busied herself redecorating her home with newly pur-
chased draperies. From the Pepys homestead in Cambridgeshire, Samuel’s
father wrote that a wagon filled with passengers had departed for London.
Samuel could now see up to twenty shops open in a handful of places,
though few after dark. As Christmas approached, a worldly Pepys had much
to be thankful for, despite new scares from plague at his Greenwich quarters
and around Seething Lane.
At Hutton Hall in Essex, Elizabeth Gauden read the bills every week,
asking Symon Patrick if it wasn’t time to return to the Gaudens’ Surrey man-
sion at Clapham. Symon demurred politely, saying her soul conflicted with a
noncompliant body. Elizabeth’s volatile emotions and headaches made her
far too vulnerable to the distemper to risk moving yet. While he admitted
that only one of his returning parishioners had succumbed to the distemper,
he noted that most of those who had gone into the country were wisely de-
laying their return. Symon was certain that some of the early returnees had
brought the infection with them, causing the fatalities to shoot up again.
Perhaps in a month, if the sickness didn’t increase, the city would fill, making
it safe for Elizabeth to come home. It wasn’t an encouraging letter. His mood
was darkened by poor church attendance: “We had nothing so good a con-
gregation yesterday as we used to have” at the height of the epidemic, he
wrote sourly, “and therefore God may in mercy quicken us again to mind our
duty and rouse up dull souls by this new alarm.”^7
Just when things seemed almost back to normal, plague deaths reported in
the bill suddenly shot up again during the second week of December. A new
fatality in Saint Gregory’s by the cathedral churchyard caused Turner to in-
form his partners in Paris of the bad news for their trade. The highest toll