But people faked those things. Especially convicts did, because it was nicer in the asylum. And Susanna Moodie ends her account of the whole thing by saying possibly Grace was deranged at the time of the crime and that accounts for it all, and therefore she will be forgiven in the afterlife. Atwood wasn't satisfied with Grace's skewed legacy, so she dug deeper. What she found was a story so warped, so mired in 19th-century misogyny, that she had to tell her own version.
Grace is the villain.
James McDermott is the dupe. She got him into it, led him on, instigated the whole thing, because she was jealous of Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper and mistress, and in love with Thomas Kinnear, the gentleman master. She says, 'No, no. And then everything else follows along from that. And Moodie tells the whole thing from the point of view of McDermott.