Free Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe Page B

the way, I had not the least affection for, should be skilful enough to challenge me on another account upon our first coming to bed together; but whether he did it with design or not I know not, but his elder brother took care to make him very much fuddled before he went to bed, so that I had the satisfaction of a drunken bedfellow the first night. How he did it I know not, but I concluded that he certainly contrived it, that his brother might be able to make no judgement of the difference between a maid and a married woman; nor did he ever entertain any notions of it or disturb his thoughts about it.
    I should go back a little here to where I left off. The elder brother having thus managed me, his next business was to manage his mother, and he never left till he had brought her to acquiesce and be passive, even without acquainting the father other than by post-letters; so that she consented to our marrying privately, leaving her to manage the father afterwards.
    Then he cajoled with his brother and persuaded him what service he had done him and how he had brought his mother to consent, which, though true, was not indeed done to serve him, but to serve himself; but thus diligently did he cheat him, and had the thanks of a faithful friend for shifting off his whore into his brother’s arms for a wife. So naturally do men give up honour and justice and even Christianity to secure themselves.
    I must now come back to brother Robin, as we always called him, who, having got his mother’s consent, as above, came big with the news to me, and told me the whole story of it with a sincerity so visible that I must confess it grieved me that I must be the instrument to abuse so honest a gentleman. But there was no remedy; he would have me, and I was not obliged to tell him that I was his brother’s whore though I had no other way to put him off; so I came gradually into it, and behold we were married.
    Modesty forbids me to reveal the secrets of the marriage-bed, but nothing could have happened more suitable to my circumstances than that, as above, my husband was so fuddled when he came to bed that he could not remember in the morning whether he had had any conversation with me or no, and I was obliged to tell him he had, though in reality he had not, that I might be sure he could make no inquiry about anything else.
    It concerns the story in hand very little to enter into the farther particulars of the family or of myself for the five years that I lived with this husband, only to observe that I had two children by him, and that at the end of the five years he died. He had been really a very good husband to me, and we lived very agreeably together; but as he had not received much from them and had in the little time he lived acquired no great matters, so my circumstances were not great, nor was I much mended by the match. Indeed, I had preserved the elder brother’s bonds to me to pay me £500, which he offered me for my consent to marry his brother; and this, with what I had saved of the money he formerly gave me and about as much more by my husband, left me a widow with about £1200 in my pocket.
    My two children were, indeed, taken happily off of my hands by my husband’s father and mother, and that was all they got by Mrs. Betty.
    I confess I was not suitably affected with the loss of my husband; nor can I say that I ever loved him as I ought to have done or was suitable to the good usage I had from him, for he was a tender, kind, good-humoured man as any woman could desire; but his brother being so always in my sight, at least while we were in the country, was a continual snare to me; and I never was in bed with my husband but I wished myself in the arms of his brother. And though his brother never offered me the least kindness that way after our marriage, but carried it just as a brother ought to do, yet it was impossible for me to do so to him; in short, I committed adultery and incest with him every day in my desires, which,