In the end, they celebrated. They bragged. They got me finally, was their feeling. They got me. They said I would take my secrets to the grave. They should be so lucky.This is the testament of Axie Muldoon: midwife, female physician, distributor of 'obscene' materials, and the most scandalous woman in New York. Her story begins in 1860, when she is thirteen years old, the child of Irish emigrants, forced to beg on the streets for pennies with her little sister Dutch and baby brother Joe. When a Christian philanthropist sends the children West to 'save' them, Axie is separated from her mother and siblings, and embarks on a quest to reunite her family.Back in New York, Axie is taken in by a local midwife who teaches her the craft she will live by - and later fight for. She makes her fortune, and discovers that the right way is not always the way of God or the law, and that you should never trust a man who says 'trust me.' But what if that man is the irresistible Charlie G. Jones (the 'G' is for Great), fellow orphan and poetical Irish soul?As she tends to her family and her desperate patients, the man who would be the righteous instrument of her downfall circles ever closer...In electrifying prose and based on a true story, Kate Manning depicts nineteenth-century New York in all its contradictions - a morass of deprivation, moral hysteria, back alleys and blind eyes - in this stunning tale of sex, freedom, family and the many faces of love.