This is the story of a woman who saw a gravestone and became a writer. From then on she became obsessed with the death and life of a seventeen year old servant girl who was hanged in 1805 for the murder of her bastard child. There was no escape from the historical web that the myth, hearsay and fact weaved around her and the great change it brought about as she approached the middle years of her life. She took on the pain of the town that had carried a secret for almost two hundred years; a town that was divided in its loyalties to the dead girl. It would have been so easy to give up the search for the truth but the possibilities of a gross miscarriage of justice, albeit in the last century, confirmed her beliefs that fair play should be available to all, regardless of class.