Chapter
6
I jested with him
extremely about the figure he would make in
He replied generously,
he did not ask what my fortune was; he had told me from the beginning he would
not, and he would be as good as his word; but whatever it was, he assured me he
would never desire me to go to Virginia with him, or go thither himself
without me, unless I was perfectly willing, and made it my choice.
All this, you may be
sure, was as I wished, and indeed nothing could have happened more perfectly
agreeable. I carried it on as far as this with a sort of indifference that he
often wondered at, more than at first, but which was the only support of his
courtship; and I mention it the rather to intimate again to the ladies that
nothing but want of courage for such an indifference makes our sex so cheap,
and prepares them to be ill-used as they are; would they venture the loss of a
pretending fop now and then, who carries it high upon the point of his own
merit, they would certainly be less slighted, and courted more. Had I
discovered really and truly what my great fortune was, and that in all I had
not full
In short, we were
married, and very happily married on my side, I assure you, as to the man;
for he was the best-humoured man that every woman had, but his circumstances
were not so good as I imagined, as, on the other hand,
he had not bettered himself by marrying so much as he expected.
When we were married, I
was shrewdly put to it to bring him that little stock I had, and to let him see
it was no more; but there was a necessity for it, so I took my opportunity one
day when we were alone, to enter into a short dialogue with him about it. ‘My
dear,’ said I, ‘we have been married a fortnight; is it not time to let
you know whether you have got a wife with something or with nothing?’ ‘Your own
time for that, my dear,’ says he; ‘I am satisfied that I have got the
wife I love; I have not troubled you much,’ says he, ‘with my inquiry
after it.’
‘That’s true,’ says I, ‘but I have a great difficulty upon me
about it, which I scarce know how to manage.’
‘What’s that, m dear?’ says
he.
‘Why,’ says I,
‘’tis a little hard upon me, and ’tis harder upon you. I am told that Captain
—’ (meaning my friend’s husband) ‘has told you I had a great deal more money
than I ever pretended to have, and I am sure I never employed him to do so.’
‘Well,’ says he,
‘Captain —may have told me so, but what then? If you have not so much, that may
lie at his door, but you never told me what you had, so I have no reason to
blame you if you have nothing at all.’
‘That’s
is so just,’ said I, ‘and so generous, that it
makes my having but a little a double affliction to me.’
‘The less you have, my
dear,’ says he, ‘the worse for us both; but I hope your affliction you
speak of is not caused for fear I should be unkind to you, for want of a
portion. No, no, if you have nothing, tell me plainly, and at once; I may
perhaps tell the captain he has cheated me, but I can never say you have
cheated me, for did you not give it under your hand that you were poor? and so I ought to expect you to be.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘my
dear, I am glad I have not been concerned in deceiving you before marriage. If
I deceive you since, ’tis ne’er the worse; that I am poor is too true,
but not so poor as to have nothing neither’; so I pulled out some bank bills,
and gave him about
I had brought him so
near to expecting nothing, by what I had said before, that the money, though
the sum was small in itself, was doubly welcome to him; he owned it was more
than he looked for, and that he did not question by my discourse to him, but
that my fine clothes, gold watch, and a diamond ring or two, had been all my
fortune.
I let him please himself
with that
‘And now, my dear,’ says I to him, ‘I am very sorry to tell you,
that there is all, and that I have given you my whole fortune.’ I added, that
if the person who had my
He was so obliged by the
manner, and so pleased with the sum, for he had been in a terrible fright lest
it had been nothing at all, that he accepted it very thankfully. And thus I got
over the fraud of passing for a fortune without money, and cheating a
man into marrying me on pretence of a fortune; which, by the way, I take
to be one of the most dangerous steps a woman can take, and in which she runs
the most hazard of being ill-used afterwards.
My husband, to give
him his due, was a man of infinite good nature, but he was no fool; and
finding his income not suited to the manner of living which he had intended, if
I had brought him what he expected, and being under a disappointment in his
return of his plantations in Virginia, he discovered many times his
inclination of going over to Virginia, to live upon his own; and often would be
magnifying the way of living there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and
the like.
I began presently to
understand this meaning, and I took him up very plainly one morning, and told
him that I did so; that I found his estate turned to no account at this distance,
compared to what it would do if he lived upon the spot, and that I found he had
a mind to go and live there; and I added, that I was sensible he had been
disappointed in a wife, and that finding his expectations not answered that
way, I could do no less, to make him amends, than tell him that I was very
willing to go over to Virginia with him and live there.
He said a thousand kind
things to me upon the subject of my making such a proposal to him. He told me,
that however he was disappointed in his expectations of a fortune, he was not
disappointed in a wife, and that I was all to him that a wife could be, and he
was more than satisfied on the whole when the particulars were put together,
but that this offer was so kind, that it was more than he could express.
To bring the story
short, we agreed to go. He told me that he had a very good house there,
that it was well furnished, that his mother was alive and lived in it, and one
sister, which was all the relations he had; that as soon as he came there, his
mother would remove to another house, which was her own for life, and his after
her decease; so that I should have all the house to myself; and I found all
this to be exactly as he had said.
To make this part of the
story short, we put on board the ship which we went in, a large quantity
of good furniture for our house, with stores of linen and other necessaries,
and a good cargo for sale, and away we went.
To give an account of
the manner of our voyage, which was long and full of dangers, is out of my way;
I kept no journal, neither did my husband. All that I can say is, that after a
terrible passage, frighted twice with dreadful
storms, and once with what was still more terrible, I mean a pirate who came on
board and took away almost all our provisions; and which would have been beyond
all to me, they had once taken my husband to go along with them, but by
entreaties were prevailed with to leave him;—I say, after all these terrible
things, we arrived in York River in Virginia, and coming to our
plantation, we were received with all the demonstrations of tenderness and
affection, by my husband’s mother, that were possible to be expressed.
We lived here all
together, my mother-in-law, at my entreaty, continuing in the house, for
she was too kind a mother to be parted with; my husband likewise continued the
same as at first, and I thought myself the happiest creature alive, when an odd
and surprising event put an end to all that felicity in a moment, and rendered
my condition the most uncomfortable, if not the most miserable, in the world.
My mother was a mighty
cheerful, good-humoured old woman —I may call her old woman, for her son was
above thirty; I say she was very pleasant, good company, and used to entertain me,
in particular, with abundance of stories to divert me, as well of the
country we were in as of the people.
Among the rest, she
often told me how the greatest part of the inhabitants of the colony came
thither in very indifferent circumstances from England; that, generally
speaking, they were of two sorts; either, first, such as were brought over by
masters of ships to be sold as servants. ‘Such as we call them, my
dear,’ says she, ‘but they are more properly called slaves.’ Or,
secondly, such as are transported from Newgate
and other prisons, after having been found guilty of felony and other crimes
punishable with death.
‘When they come here,’ says
she, ‘we make no difference; the planters buy them, and they work together
in the field till their time is out. When ’tis expired,’ said she, ‘they
have encouragement given them to plant for themselves; for they have a certain
number of acres of land allotted them by the country, and they go to work to
clear and cure the land, and then to plant it with tobacco and corn for their
own use; and as the tradesmen and merchants will trust them with tools and
clothes and other necessaries, upon the credit of their crop before it is
grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year before, and
so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before them.
‘Hence, child,’ says
she, ‘man a Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and
we have,’ continued she, ‘several justices of the peace, officers of the
trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt
in the hand.’
She was going on with
that part of the story, when her own part in it interrupted her, and with a
great deal of good-humoured confidence she told me she was one of the second
sort of inhabitants herself; that she came away openly, having ventured too far
in a particular case, so that she was become a criminal. ‘And here’s the mark
of it, child,’ says she; and, pulling off her glove, ‘look ye here,’ says
she, turning up the palm of her hand, and showed me a very fine white arm
and hand, but branded in the inside of the hand, as in such cases it must be.
This story was very
moving to me, but my mother, smiling, said, ‘You need not thing a thing
strange, daughter, for as I told you, some of the best men in this
country are burnt in the hand, and they are not ashamed to own it. There’s
Major —,’ says she, ‘he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba—r, was a shoplifter, and both of them were burnt in the
hand; and I could name you several such as they are.’
We had frequent
discourses of this kind, and abundance of instances she gave me of the like.
After some time, as she was telling some stories of one that was transported
but a few weeks ago, I began in an intimate kind of way to ask her to tell me
something of her own story, which she did with the utmost plainness and
sincerity; how she had fallen into very ill company in London in her
young days, occasioned by her mother sending her frequently to carry victuals
and other relief to a kinswoman of hers who was a prisoner in Newgate, and who lay in a miserable starving condition, was
afterwards condemned to be hanged, but having got respite by pleading her
belly, dies afterwards in the prison.
Here my mother-in-law
ran out in a long account of the wicked practices in that dreadful place, and
how it ruined more young people that all the town besides. ‘And child,’ says
my mother, ‘perhaps you may know little of it, or, it may be, have heard
nothing about it; but depend upon it,’ says she, ‘we all know here that
there are more thieves and rogues made by that one prison of Newgate than by all the clubs and societies of
villains in the nation; ’tis that cursed place,’ says my mother, ‘that
half peopled this colony.’
Here she went on with
her own story so long, and in so particular a manner, that I began to be very
uneasy; but coming to one particular that required telling her name, I thought
I should have sunk down in the place. She perceived I was out of order, and
asked me if I was not well, and what ailed me. I told her I was so affected
with the melancholy story she had told, and the terrible things she had gone
through, that it had overcome me, and I begged of her to talk no more of it.
‘Why, my dear,’ says she very kindly, ‘what need these things trouble you?
These passages were long before your time, and they give me no trouble at all
now; nay, I look back on them with a particular satisfaction, as they have been
a means to bring me to this place.’ Then she went on to tell me how she very
luckily fell into a good family, where, behaving herself well, and her mistress
dying, her master married her, by whom she had my husband and his sister, and
that by her diligence and good management after her husband’s death, she had
improved the plantations to such a degree as they then were, so that most of
the estate was of her getting, not her husband’s, for she had been a widow
upwards of sixteen years.
I heard this part of
they story with very little attention, because I wanted much to retire and give
vent to my passions, which I did soon after; and let any one judge what must be
the anguish of my mind, when I came to reflect that this was certainly no more
or less than my own mother, and I had now had two children, and was big
with another by my own brother, and lay with him still every night.
I was now the most unhappy of all women in the world. Oh! had the story never been told me, all had been well; it had
been no crime to have lain with my husband, since as to his being my relation I
had known nothing of it.
I had now such a load on
my mind that it kept me perpetually waking; to reveal it, which would have
been some ease to me, I could not find would be to any purpose, and yet to
conceal it would be next to impossible; nay, I did not doubt but I should talk
of it in my sleep, and tell my husband of it whether I would or no. If I discovered
it, the least thing I could expect was to lose my husband, for he was too nice
and too honest a man to have continued my husband after he had known I had been
his sister; so that I was perplexed to the last degree.
I leave it to any man to
judge what difficulties presented to my view. I was away from my native
country, at a distance prodigious, and the return to me unpassable.
I lived very well, but in a circumstance insufferable in itself. If I had
discovered myself to my mother, it might be difficult to convince her of the
particulars, and I had no way to prove them. On the other hand, if she
had questioned or doubted me, I had been undone, for the bare suggestion would
have immediately separated me from my husband, without gaining my mother or him,
who would have been neither a husband nor a brother; so that between the
surprise on one hand, and the uncertainty on the other, I had been sure to be
undone.
In the meantime, as I
was but too sure of the fact, I lived therefore in open avowed incest and
whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest wife; and though I was not
much touched with the crime of it, yet the action had something in it shocking
to nature, and made my husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to
me.
However, upon the most
sedate consideration, I resolved that it was absolutely necessary to conceal it
all and not make the least discovery of it either to mother or husband; and
thus I lived with the greatest pressure imaginable for three years more, but
had no more children.
During this time my
mother used to be frequently telling me old stories of her former adventures,
which, however, were no ways pleasant to me; for by it, though she did not tell
it me in plain terms, yet I could easily understand, joined with what I had
heard myself, of my first tutors, that in her younger days she had been both
whore and thief; but I verily believed she had lived to repent sincerely of
both, and that she was then a very pious, sober, and religious woman.
Well, let her life have
been what it would then, it was certain that my life was very uneasy to me; for
I lived, as I have said, but in the worst sort of whoredom, and as I could
expect no good of it, so really no good issue came of it, and all my seeming
prosperity wore off, and ended in misery and destruction. It was some time,
indeed, before it came to this, for, but I know not by what ill fate guided,
everything went wrong with us afterwards, and that which was worse, my husband
grew strangely altered, forward, jealous, and unkind, and I was as impatient of
bearing his carriage, as the carriage was unreasonable and unjust. These things
proceeded so far, that we came at last to be in such ill terms with one
another, that I claimed a promise of him, which he entered willingly into with
me when I consented to come from England with him, viz. that if I found
the country not to agree with me, or that I did not like to live there, I
should come away to England again when I pleased, giving him a year’s
warning to settle his affairs.
I say, I now claimed
this promise of him, and I must confess I did it not in the most obliging
terms that could be in the world neither; but I insisted that he treated me
ill, that I was remote from my friends, and could do myself no justice, and
that he was jealous without cause, my conversation having been unblameable, and he having no pretense
for it, and that to remove to England would take away all occasion from
him.
I insisted so
peremptorily upon it, that he could not avoid coming to a point, either to keep
his word with me or to break it; and this, notwithstanding he used all the
skill he was master of, and employed his mother and other agents to prevail
with me to alter my resolutions; indeed, the bottom of the thing lay at my
heart, and that made all his endeavours fruitless, for my heart was alienated
from him as a husband. I loathed the thoughts of bedding with him, and
used a thousand pretenses of illness and humour to
prevent his touching me, fearing nothing more than to be with child by him,
which to be sure would have prevented, or at least delayed, my going over to
However, at last I put
him so out of humour, that he took up a rash and fatal resolution; in short, I
should not go to England; and though he had promised me, yet it was an
unreasonable thing for me to desire it; that it would be ruinous to his
affairs, would unhinge his whole family, and be next to an undoing him in the
world; that therefore I ought not to desire it of him, and that no wife in the
world that valued her family and her husband’s prosperity would insist upon
such a thing.
This plunged me again,
for when I considered the thing calmly, and took my husband as he really was, a
diligent, careful man in the main work of laying up an estate for his children,
and that he knew nothing of the dreadful circumstances that he was in, I could
not but confess to myself that my proposal was very unreasonable, and what no
wife that had the good of her family at heart would have desired.
But my discontents were
of another nature; I looked upon him no longer as a husband, but as a near
relation, the son of my own mother, and I resolved somehow or other to be clear
of him, but which way I did not know, nor did it seem
possible.
It is said by the
ill-natured world, of our sex, that if we are set on a thing, it is
impossible to turn us from our resolutions; in short, I never ceased poring
upon the means to bring to pass my voyage, and came that length with my husband
at last, as to propose going without him. This provoked him to the last degree,
and he called me not only an unkind wife, but an unnatural mother, and asked me
how I could entertain such a thought without horror, as that of leaving my two
children (for one was dead) without a mother, and to be brought up by
strangers, and never to see them more. It was true, had things been
right, I should not have done it, but now it was my real desire never to
see them, or him either, any more; and as to the charge of unnatural, I could
easily answer it to myself, while I knew that the whole relation was unnatural
in the highest degree in the world.
However, it was plain
there was no bringing my husband to anything; he would neither go with me nor
let me go without him, and it was quite out of my power to stir without his
consent, as any one that knows the constitution of the country I was in, knows
very well.
We had many family
quarrels about it, and they began in time to grow up to a dangerous height; for
as I was quite estranged form my husband (as he was called) in
affection, so I took no heed to my words, but sometimes gave him language that
was provoking; and, in short, strove all I could to bring him to a
parting with me, which was what above all things in the world I desired most.
He took my carriage very
ill, and indeed he might well do so, for at last I refused to bed with him, and
carrying on the breach upon all occasions to extremity, he told me once he
thought I was mad, and if I did not alter my conduct, he would put me under
cure; that is to say, into a madhouse. I told him he should find I was
far enough from mad, and that it was not in his power, or any other villain’s,
to murder me. I confess at the same time I was heartily frighted
at his thoughts of putting me into a madhouse, which would at once have
destroyed all the possibility of breaking the truth out, whatever the occasion
might be; for that then no one would have given credit to a word of it.
This therefore brought
me to a resolution, whatever came of it, to lay open my whole case; but
which way to do it, or to whom, was an inextricable
difficulty, and took me many months to resolve. In the meantime, another
quarrel with my husband happened, which came up to such a mad extreme as almost
pushed me on to tell it him all to his face; but though I kept it in so as not
to come to the particulars, I spoke so much as put him into the utmost
confusion, and in the end brought out the whole story.
He began with a calm
expostulation upon my being so resolute to go to England; I defended it,
and one hard word bringing on another, as is usual in all family strife, he
told me I did not treat him as if he was my husband, or talk of my children
as if I was a mother; and, in short, that I did not deserve to be used
as a wife; that he had used all the fair means possible with me; that he had
argued with all the kindness and calmness that a husband or a Christian ought
to do, and that I made him such a vile return, that I treated him rather like a
dog than a man, and rather like the most contemptible stranger than a husband;
that he was very loth to use violence with me, but
that, in short, he saw a necessity of it now, and that for the future he
should be obliged to take such measures as should reduce me to my duty.
My blood was now fired
to the utmost, though I knew what he had said was very true, and nothing
could appear more provoked. I told him, for his fair means and his foul, they
were equally contemned by me; that for my going to England, I was
resolved on it, come what would; and that as to treating him not like a
husband, and not showing myself a mother to my children, there might be
something more in it than he understood at present; but, for his further
consideration, I thought fit to tell him thus much, that he neither was my
lawful husband, nor they lawful children, and that I had reason to regard
neither of them more than I did.
I confess I was moved to
pity him when I spoke it, for he turned pale as death, and stood mute as one
thunderstruck, and once or twice I thought he would have fainted; in short,
it put him in a fit something like an apoplex; he
trembled, a sweat or dew ran off his face, and yet he was cold as a clod, so
that I was forced to run and fetch something for him to keep life in him. When
he recovered of that, he grew sick and vomited, and in a little after was put
to bed, and the next morning was, as he had been indeed all night, in a violent
fever.
However, it went off
again, and he recovered, though but slowly, and when he came to be a little
better, he told me I had given him a mortal wound with my tongue, and he had
only one thing to ask before he desired an explanation. I interrupted him, and
told him I was sorry I had gone so far, since I saw what disorder it put him
into, but I desired him not to talk to me of explanations, for that would but
make things worse.
This heightened his
impatience, and, indeed, perplexed him beyond all bearing; for now he began to
suspect that there was some mystery yet unfolded, but could not make the least
guess at the real particulars of it; all that ran in his brain was, that I had
another husband alive, which I could not say in fact might not be true, but I
assured him, however, there was not the least of that in it; and indeed, as to
my other husband, he was effectually dead in law to me, and had told me I
should look on him as such, so I had not the least uneasiness on that score.
But now I found the
thing too far gone to conceal it much longer, and my husband himself gave me an
opportunity to ease myself of the secret, much to my satisfaction. He had
laboured with me three or four weeks, but to no purpose, only to tell
him whether I had spoken these words only as the effect of my passion, to put
him in a passion, or whether there was anything of truth in the bottom of them.
But I continued inflexible, and would explain nothing, unless he would first
consent to my going to England, which he would never do, he said, while
he lived; on the other hand, I said it was in my power to make him willing when
I pleased—nay, to make him entreat me to go; and this increased his curiosity,
and made him importunate to the highest degree, but it was all to no purpose.
At length he tells all
this story to his mother, and sets her upon me to get the main secret out of
me, and she used her utmost skill with me indeed; but I put her to a full stop
at once by telling her that the reason and mystery of the whole matter
lay in herself, and that it was my respect to her that had made me conceal it;
and that, in short, I could go no farther, and therefore conjured her not to
insist upon it.
She was struck dumb at this
suggestion, and could not tell what to say or to think; but, laying aside the
supposition as a policy of mine, continued her importunity on account of her
son, and, if possible, to make up the breach between us two. As to that, I
told her that it was indeed a good design in her, but that it was
impossible to be done; and that if I should reveal to her the truth of what she
desired, she would grant it to be impossible, and cease to desire it. At last I
seemed to be prevailed on by her importunity, and told her I dared trust her
with a secret of the greatest importance, and she would soon see that this was
so, and that I would consent to lodge it in her breast, if she would engage
solemnly not to acquaint her son with it without my consent.
She was long in
promising this part, but rather than not come at the main secret, she agreed to
that too, and after a great many other preliminaries, I began, and told her the
whole story. First I told her how much she was concerned in all the unhappy
breach which had happened between her son and me, by telling me her own story
and her London name; and that the surprise she saw I was in was upon
that occasion. The I told her my own story, and my name, and assured her, by
such other tokens as she could not deny, that I was no other, nor more or less,
than her own child, her daughter, born of her body in Newgate; the same that had saved her from the
gallows by being in her belly, and the same that she left in such-and-such
hands when she was transported.
It is impossible to express
the astonishment she was in; she was not inclined to believe the story, or to
remember the particulars, for she immediately foresaw the confusion that must
follow in the family upon it. But everything concurred so exactly with the
stories she had told me of herself, and which, if she had not told me, she
would perhaps have been content to have denied, that she had stopped her own
mouth, and she had nothing to do but to take me about the neck and kiss me, and
cry most vehemently over me, without speaking one word for a long time
together. At last she broke out: ‘Unhappy child!’ says she, ‘what
miserable chance could bring thee hither? and in the
arms of my own son, too! Dreadful girl,’ says she, ‘why, we are all
undone! Married to thy own brother! Three children,
and two alive, all of the same flesh and blood! My son and my daughter lying
together as husband and wife! All confusion and distraction for ever! Miserable
family! what will become of us? What is to be
said? What is to be done?’ And thus she ran on for a
great while; nor had I any power to speak, or if I had, did I know what to say,
for every word wounded me to the soul. With this kind of amazement on our
thoughts we parted for the first time, though my mother was more surprised than
I was, because it was more news to her than to me. However, she promised again
to me at parting, that she would say nothing of it to her son, till we had
talked of it again.
© Bibliomania.com Ltd,