Moll Flanders (38 page)

I understood her presently, but told her I saw no room to hope for anything but a strict execution of the order, and as it was a severity that was esteemed a mercy, there was no doubt but it would be strictly observed. She said no more but this: “We will try what can be done”; and so we parted.

I lay in the prison near fifteen weeks after this. What the reason of it was I know not, but at the end of this time I was put on board of a ship in the Thames, and with me a gang of thirteen as hardened, vile creatures as ever Newgate produced in my time; and it would really well take up a history longer than mine to describe the degrees of impudence and audacious villainy that those thirteen were arrived to and the manner of their behaviour in the voyage, of which I have a very diverting account by me, which the captain of the ship who carried them over gave me and which he caused his mate to write down at large.

It may perhaps be thought trifling to enter here into a relation of all the little incidents which attended me in this interval of my circumstances; I mean, between the final order for my transportation and the time of going on board the ship; and I am too near the end of my story to allow room for it; but something relating to me and my Lancashire husband I must not omit.

He had, as I have observed already, been carried from the master’s side of the ordinary prison into the press-yard with three of his comrades, for they found another to add to them after some time; here, for what reason I knew not, they were kept without being brought to a trial almost three months. It seems they found means to bribe or buy off some who were to come in against them, and they wanted evidence to convict them. After some puzzle on this account they made shift to get proof enough against two of them to carry them off; but the other two, of which my Lancashire husband was one, lay still in suspense. They had, I think, one positive evidence against each of them, but the law obliging them to have two witnesses, they could make nothing of it. Yet they were resolved not to part with the men neither, not doubting but evidence would at last come in; and in order to this, I think publication was made that such prisoners were taken and any one might come to the prison and see them.

I took this opportunity to satisfy my curiosity, pretending I had been robbed in the Dunstable coach, and that I would go to see the two highwaymen. But when I came into the press-yard, I so disguised myself and muffled my face up so that he could see little of me and knew nothing of who I was; but when I came back, I said publicly that I knew them very well.

Immediately it was all over the prison that Moll Flanders would turn evidence against one of the highwaymen, and that I was to come off by it from the sentence of transportation.

They heard of it, and immediately my husband desired to see this Mrs. Flanders that knew him so well and was to be an evidence against him; and accordingly I had leave to go to him. I dressed myself up as well as the best clothes that I suffered myself ever to appear in there would allow me, and went to the press-yard, but had a hood over my face. He said little to me at first, but asked me if I knew him. I told him, “Yes, very well”; but as I concealed my face, so I counterfeited my voice too, that he had no guess at who I was. He asked me where I had seen him. I told him between Dunstable and Brickhill; but, turning to the keeper that stood by, I asked if I might not be admitted to talk with him alone. He said, “Yes, yes,” and so very civilly withdrew.

As soon as he was gone and I had shut the door, I threw off my hood and, bursting out into tears, “My dear,” said I, “do you not know me?” He turned pale and stood speechless, like one thunderstruck, and not able to conquer the surprise, said no more but this: “Let me sit down”; and sitting down by the table, leaning his head on his hand, fixed his eyes on the ground as one stupid. I cried so vehemently, on the other hand, that it was a good while ere I could speak any more; but after I had given vent to my passion I repeated the same words: “My dear, do you not know me?” At which he answered, “Yes,” and said no more a good while.

After some time continuing in the surprise, as above, he cast up his eyes towards me and said, “How could you be so cruel?” I did not really understand what he meant, and I answered, “How can you call me cruel?” “To come to me,” says he, “in such a place as this—is it not to insult me? I have not robbed you, at least not on the highway.”

I perceived by this that he knew nothing of the miserable circumstances I was in and thought that having got intelligence of his being there, I had come to upbraid him with his leaving me. But I had too much to say to him to be affronted, and told him in a few words that I was far from coming to insult him, but at best I came to condole mutually; that he would be easily satisfied that I had no such view when I should tell him that my condition was worse than his, and that many ways. He looked a little concerned at the expression of my condition being worse than his, but with a kind of a smile said, “How can that be? When you see me fettered, and in Newgate, and two of my companions executed already, can you say your condition is worse than mine?”

“Come, my dear,” says I, “we have a long piece of work to do if I should be to relate or you to hear my unfortunate history; but if you will hear it, you will soon conclude with me that my condition is worse than yours.” “How is that possible,” says he, “when I expect to be cast for my life the very next sessions?” “Yes,” says I, “’tis very possible when I shall tell you that I have been cast for my life three sessions ago, and am now under sentence of death. Is not my case worse than yours?”

Then, indeed, he stood silent again, like one struck dumb, and after a little while he starts up. “Unhappy couple!” says he. “How can this be possible?” I took him by the hand. “Come, my dear,” said I, “sit down and let us compare our sorrows. I am a prisoner in this very house and in a much worse circumstance than you, and you will be satisfied I do not come to insult you when I tell you the particulars.” And with this we sat down together, and I told him so much of my story as I thought convenient, bringing it at last to my being reduced to great poverty, and representing myself as fallen into some company that led me to relieve my distresses by a way that I had been utterly unacquainted with, and that they making an attempt on a tradesman’s house, I was seized upon for having been but just at the door, the maidservant pulling me in; that I neither had broke any lock or taken anything away, and that notwithstanding that, I was brought in guilty and sentenced to die; but that the judges, having been made sensible of the hardship of my circumstances, had obtained leave for me to be transported.

I told him I fared the worse for being taken in the prison for one Moll Flanders, who was a famous, successful thief that all of them had heard of but none of them had ever seen; but that, as he knew, was none of my name. But I placed all to the account of my ill fortune, and that under this name I was dealt with as an old offender though this was the first thing they had ever known of me. I gave him a long account of what had befallen me since I saw him, but told him I had seen him since he might think I had; then gave him an account how I had seen him at Brickhill, how he was pursued, and how, by giving an account that I knew him and that he was a very honest gentleman, the hue and cry was stopped and the high constable went back again.

He listened most attentively to all my story and smiled at the particulars, being all of them infinitely below what he had been at the head of; but when I came to the story of Little Brickhill, he was surprised. “And was it you, my dear,” said he, “that gave the check to the mob at Brickhill?” “Yes,” said I, “it was I indeed.” Then I told him the particulars which I had observed of him there. “Why, then,” said he, “it was you that saved my life at that time, and I am glad I owe my life to you, for I will pay the debt to you now, and I’ll deliver you from the present condition you are in or I will die in the attempt.”

I told him by no means; it was a risk too great, not worth his running the hazard of and for a life not worth his saving. ’Twas no matter for that, he said; it was a life worth all the world to him, a life that had given him a new life; “for,” says he, “I was never in real danger but that time till the last minute when I was taken.” Indeed, his danger then lay in his believing he had not been pursued that way; for they had gone off from Hockley quite another way, and had come over the enclosed country into Brickhill, and were sure they had not been seen by anybody.

Here he gave a long history of his life, which indeed would make a very strange history and be infinitely diverting. He told me that he took the road about twelve years before he married me; that the woman which called him brother was not any kin to him, but one that belonged to their gang and who, keeping correspondence with them, lived always in town, having great acquaintance; that she gave them perfect intelligence of persons going out of town, and that they had made several good booties by her correspondence; that she thought she had fixed a fortune for him when she brought me to him, but happened to be disappointed, which he really could not blame her for; that if I had had an estate, which she was informed I had, he had resolved to leave off the road and live a new life, but never to appear in public till some general pardon had been passed or till he could for money have got his name into some particular pardon, so that he might have been perfectly easy; but that as it had proved otherwise, he was obliged to take up the old trade again.

He gave a long account of some of his adventures and particularly one where he robbed the West Chester coaches near Lichfield, when he got a very great booty; and after that, how he robbed five graziers in the west, going to Burford Fair, in Wiltshire, to buy sheep. He told me he got so much money on those two occasions that if he had known where to have found me, he would certainly have embraced my proposal of going with me to Virginia, or to have settled in a plantation, or some other of the English colonies in America.

He told me he wrote three letters to me, directed according to my order, but heard nothing from me. This indeed I knew to be true, but the letters coming to my hand in the time of my latter husband, I could do nothing in it and therefore gave no answer, that so he might believe they had miscarried.

Being thus disappointed, he said he carried on the old trade ever since, though when he had gotten so much money, he said, he did not run such desperate risks as he did before. Then he gave me some account of several hard and desperate encounters which he had with gentlemen on the road, who parted too hardly with their money, and showed me some wounds he had received; and he had one or two very terrible wounds indeed, particularly one by a pistol-bullet which broke his arm, and another with a sword which run him quite through the body, but that missing his vitals, he was cured again; one of his comrades having kept with him so faithfully and so friendly as that he assisted him in riding near eighty miles before his arm was set, and then got a surgeon in a considerable city remote from the place where it was done, pretending they were gentlemen travelling towards Carlisle, that they had been attacked on the road by highwaymen, and that one of them had shot him into the arm.

This, he said, his friend managed so well that they were not suspected, but lay still till he was cured. He gave me also so many distinct accounts of his adventures that it is with great reluctance that I decline the relating them; but this is my own story, not his.

I then inquired into the circumstances of his present case and what it was he expected when he came to be tried. He told me that they had no evidence against him; for that of the three robberies which they were all charged with, it was his good fortune that he was but in one of them, and that there was but one witness to be had to that fact, which was not sufficient; but that it was expected some others would come in, and that he thought when he first see me I had been one that came of that errand; but that if nobody came in against him, he hoped he should be cleared; that he had some intimation that if he would submit to transport himself, he might be admitted to it without a trial; but that he could not think of it with any temper and thought he could much easier submit to be hanged.

I blamed him for that; first, because if he was transported, there might be an hundred ways for him that was a gentleman and a bold enterprising man to find his way back again, and perhaps some ways and means to come back before he went. He smiled at that part and said he should like the last the best of the two, for he had a kind of horror upon his mind at his being sent to the plantations as the Romans sent slaves to work in the mines; that he thought the passage into another state much more tolerable at the gallows, and that this was the general notion of all the gentlemen who were driven by the exigence of their fortunes to take the road; that at the place of execution there was at least an end of all the miseries of the present state; and as for what was to follow, a man was, in his opinion, as likely to repent sincerely in the last fortnight of his life under the agonies of a jail and the condemned hole as he would ever be in the woods and wildernesses of America; that servitude and hard labour were things gentlemen could never stoop to; that it was but the way to force them to be their own executioners, which was much worse; and that he could not have any patience when he did but think of it.

I used the utmost of my endeavour to persuade him, and joined that known woman’s rhetoric to it—I mean that of tears. I told him the infamy of a public execution was certainly a greater pressure upon the spirits of a gentleman than any mortifications that he could meet with abroad; that he had at least in the other a chance for his life, whereas here he had none at all; that it was the easiest thing in the world for him to manage the captain of a ship, who were, generally speaking, men of good humour; and a small matter of conduct, especially if there was any money to be had, would make way for him to buy himself off when he came to Virginia.

He looked wishfully at me, and I guessed he meant that he had no money; but I was mistaken, his meaning was another way. “You hinted just now, my dear,” said he, “that there might be a way of coming back before I went, by which I understood you that it might be possible to buy it off here. I had rather give £200 to prevent going than £100 to be set at liberty when I came there.” “That is, my dear,” said I, “because you do not know the place so well as I do.” “That may be,” said he, “and yet I believe, as well as you know it, you would do the same, unless it is because, as you told me, you have a mother there.”