![]() ![]() The characters, places, and some of the major events in Halls' well-researched novel are historically accurate, though the author adds some fictional embroidery: There's no evidence that Fleetwood and Alice met, let alone formed an alliance. ![]() Fleetwood, traveling around the countryside accompanied only by her mastiff, Puck-to her husband's chagrin-must try to find a way to free Alice before she is condemned to death. The two have become friends, and Fleetwood's pregnancy is proceeding smoothly, when Alice is accused, along with a dozen of her friends and neighbors, of witchcraft and jailed in a dungeon by a local magistrate. Desperate to produce an heir so she won't be cast aside for a more fertile wife or mistress, and even more frantic to survive the childbirth she suspects may cause her death, she seeks out the help of local midwife Alice Gray. She's pregnant for the fourth time, though each of her earlier pregnancies has resulted in a miscarriage. The narrator of journalist Halls' dramatic first novel is 17-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, married at 13 to Richard Shuttleworth, lord of Gawthorpe Hall. ![]() The lives of two young women intersect in a novel that imagines the story behind a famous 17th-century witch trial in northern England. ![]()
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