They had left London only just in time; for early in July several of the houses in Pall Mall were infected, and one “almost emptied.”[298] The meetings of the Royal Society had been adjourned. The King and Court were gone:[299] people were rapidly leaving town. Hooke and Petty and Wilkins were thinking of removing to Nonsuch, taking an operator with them in order to carry on their experiments out of range of infection.[300] Oldenburg and his family remained in London. He had carefully separated his papers—Mr. Boyle’s, the Society’s, and his own—into bundles, and had written instructions what should be done with them should he succumb to the Plague. Robert Boyle was back in Oxford before the end of June, but before leaving town he had sent Oldenburg a “receipt for the Sickness.” Pepys, it is known, went about with a bottle of “Plague-water” presented to him by Lady Carteret, of which he took a sip when he felt particularly depressed. Whether Oldenburg drank Mr. Boyle’s medicine or not is unrecorded, but he escaped infection; and the Transactions of the Royal Society, and some of Boyle’s papers with them, went safely through the Plague only to suffer havoc in the Fire. In July Lady Ranelagh was writing to her brother at Oxford, begging him to join the family-party at Leeze, and to bring any number more of his _Occasional Meditations_ with him, which the ladies of the family would help him to transcribe for a second edition of his delightful book. At Leeze they were all taking “palsy-balsam.” “Our palsy-balsam does wonders here,” she wrote. “Crip,” who seems to have been the family apothecary, major-domo, and factotum, had been very careful of them all, she says. The palsy-balsam, Crip’s “jealousy,” and God’s providence together had kept, not only the family at Leeze itself, but the entire neighbourhood, free of infection. And all the ladies, and the Countess, and “my girls” were at Robert Boyle’s service.[301] And yet he did not go. He was still at Oxford in August, much tied in attendance on Lady Clarendon and the Lord Chancellor and their new daughter-in-law.[302] He had declined the Provostship of Eton, vacant by Dr. Meredith’s death, and had accepted the degree of Doctor of Physic at the hands of the University. And he was still in Oxford early in September, when Lady Ranelagh wrote again—this time in more sombre mood, for the weekly Bills of Mortality had been grim reading. She could not help seeing a Nemesis over London: a connexion—as awful as it was inscrutable—between “what was going on there before we left it and what has been suffered there since.”[303] Would not her brother still seek a shelter at delicious Leeze?