I nodded and opened my mouth to say something, but immediately it was filled for me, as Anne-Marie pressed a soft rubber ball between my teeth and buckled a retaining strap at the nape of my neck to prevent me spitting it out again. 'Oh, sweet, ' she trilled. She came around and knelt down, so that she was looking up into my face. 'I'll have to let you see yourself gagged, ' she said. 'A gag does make a girl's face look so gorgeous, I've always thought; makes those big eyes look even bigger.' Born in the fifties, a child in the 'Swinging Sixties', Teena Thyme comes to adulthood in the even more outlandish seventies, a self-possessed eighteen year old with the ability to see the funny side of most things. Little does she know, when she inherits the estate of a great-great-great aunt she never knew she had, that she will need all her wits, resolve and downright bloody-mindedness in order to survive the trials of time travelling and the perils of being a woman in an age when men ruled - either with a rod of birch or a whip of leather.

Whisked back through the ages, Teena finds herself as the very unwilling pawn in the power games of the black hearted Sir Gregory Hacklebury, who is determined to marry another of her previously unknown ancestors and seize her inheritance, even if to do so means that he must kill the unfortunate Angelina Spigworth, whose body Teena is now inhabiting - a body constrained by corsets, abused by everyone she comes in contact with and finally, it seems, destined to be left to rot in a forgotten prison.