The Ghost Wife

The Industrial Revolution is blackening the English countryside... Women and children hack at coal in darkness underground and drag loaded tubs like animals.

Rattle is one of them – a dirty, pipe-smoking, swearing collier wench, who dresses and swaggers like a boy.

But she’s in love... With the young farmer who works the land on the hill above the mine. Jonathan Turner, a god-fearing, prim and proper Methodist.

“Above the waistband of his trousers, he was naked, and he had a figure nearly as good as a collier's: the same marked narrowing from the shoulders to a small, tight waist, and a small, round bum. When he twisted at the waist or stooped, he went away to nothing there, as slender as a whippet.”

Rattle is determined to have him. Except that he’s already married – to a ghost.

To lay the ghost, and free Jonathan for herself, Rattle goes to the wicked, fever-ridden town of Dudham, to buy the help of the Dudham Devil...