You Dare Touch My Granddaughter? I'll Send You Straight to the Scaffold

The year I turned sixty, my granddaughter, only fifteen, went to attend the flower banquet at the Hall residence. When she came back, they threw her out through the side gate in a shabby little sedan. The pleated skirt she had worn there was gone, and she was wrapped in a man's outer cloak. Across her pale neck and her bared ankles were more than twenty bite marks and bruises, some faint, some deep.