A HISTORY OF THE LIFE OF ROXANA

MUST go back here, after telling openly the wicked things I did, to mention something which, however, had the face of doing good. I remembered that when I went from England, which was fifteen years before, I had left five little children, turned out as it were to the wide world, and to the charity of their father's relations; the eldest was not six years old, for we had not been married full seven years when their father went away.

After my coming to England I was greatly desirous to hear how things stood with them, and whether they were all alive or not, and in what manner they had been maintained; and yet I resolved not to discover myself to them in the least, or to let any of the people that had the breeding of them up know that there was such a body left in the world as their mother.

Amy was the only body I could trust with such a commission, and I sent her into Spitalfields, to the old aunt and to the poor woman that were so instrumental in disposing the relations to take some care of the children, but they were both gone, dead and [1]

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buried some years. The next inquiry she made was at the house where she carried the poor children, and turned them in at the door. When she came there she found the house inhabited by other people, so that she could make little or nothing of her inquiries, and came back with an answer that indeed was no answer to me, for it gave me no satisfaction at all. I sent her back to inquire in the neighbourhood what was become of the family that lived in that house; and if they were removed, where they lived, and what circumstances they were in; and, withal, if she could, what became of the poor children, and how they lived, and where; how they had been treated; and the like.

She brought me back word upon this second going, that she heard, as to the family, that the husband, who, though but uncle-in-law to the children, had yet been kindest to them, was dead; and that the widow was left but in mean circumstances — that is to say, she did not want, but that she was not so well in the world as she was thought to be when her husband was alive; that, as to the poor children, two of them, it seems, had been kept by her, that is to say, by her husband, while he lived, for that it was against her will, that we all knew; but the honest neighbours pitied the poor children, they said, heartily; for that their aunt used them barbarously, and made them little better than servants in the house to wait upon her and her children, and scarce allowed them clothes fit to wear.