While draining a pond during work for the construction of the Stockton to Darlington Railway George Stephenson''s workers discover a female corpse with a dagger stuck between her ribs—could it be that of Lady Beresford, the French wife of a local baron who disappeared under mysterious circumstances twenty years ago? The identity of the victim is at the heart of Jean-Pierre Ohl''s novel, a richly woven tapestry set during the rise of capitalism in England.The Devil''s Road has a Dickensian range of characters from the indolent liberal lawyer Bailey, with a taste for Byron''s poems and madeira wine, his imperturbable clerk Snegg, the activist worker Davies and the ''Corporal'', a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and demonstrator wounded at the Peterloo Massacre—there is even a role for the young Charles Dickens working in the blacking warehouse.