THE BAILIFF’S WIFE

When Sarah Kidd arrives in Chalfont St James, the townspeople made it clear that they would rather let a crime go unpunished than listen to an outsider. But Sarah is sure that it is her husband whose body was discovered near the inn and buried in a pauper’s grave, the fortune he earned as a bailiff missing. And she has an opinion about who is to blame. Quaker Frances Bright and the new parish priest Arthur Brunskill, both also outsiders of a sort, take up her cause, each in their own way. Yet it takes the actions of an adolescent girl, Frances’ daughter, Jane, to ensure that justice, of a kind, is done. *A 17th-century broadsheet about a murder in a village north of London sparked this tale of a woman’s search for justice. Against the background of Restoration England, we find ourselves in a world not unlike our own, full of passions and prejudices, but built without apology on rank and deference.