The Bailiff's Wife

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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. </span></p><p>*</p><p>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.</p>