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