that my old husband was dead, and had not been buried above
a fortnight. This, I confess, was not disagreeable news,
because now I could appear as I was, in a married condition;
so I told my son before I came from him, that I believed I
should marry a gentleman who had a plantation near mine;
and though I was legally free to marry, as to any obligation
that was on me before, yet that I was shy of it, lest the blot
should some time or other be revived, and it might make a
husband uneasy. My son, the same kind, dutiful, and obliging
creature as ever, treated me now at his own house, paid me
my hundred pounds, and sent me home again loaded with presents.
Some time after this, I let my son know I was married, and
invited him over to see us, and my husband wrote a very
obliging letter to him also, inviting him to come and see him;
and he came accordingly some months after, and happened to
be there just when my cargo from England came in, which I
let him believe belonged all to my husband’s estate, not to me.
It must be observed that when the old wretch my brother
(husband) was dead, I then freely gave my husband an account
of all that affair, and of this cousin, as I had called him before,
being my own son by that mistaken unhappy match. He was
perfectly easy in the account, and told me he should have
been as easy if the old man, as we called him, had been alive.
‘For,’ said he, ‘it was no fault of yours, nor of his; it was a
mistake impossible to be prevented.’ He only reproached him
with desiring me to conceal it, and to live with him as a wife,
after I knew that he was my brother; that, he said, was a vile
part. Thus all these difficulties were made easy, and we lived
together with the greatest kindness and comfort imaginable.
We are grown old; I am come back to England, being almost
seventy years of age, husband sixty-eight, having performed
much more than the limited terms of my transportation; and
now, notwithstanding all the fatigues and all the miseries we
have both gone through, we have both gone through, we are
both of us in good heart and health. My husband remained
there some time after me to settle our affairs, and at first I had
intended to go back to him, but at his desire I altered that
resolution, and he is come over to England also, where we
resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence
for the wicked lives we have lived.
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1683