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 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