Records indicate that at one point she peered and listened through a hole in a wall. It was a shared wall. By looking out of her home, Margaret was gazing directly into the private rooms of her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. John Underhill.1 If the Underhills had been playing cards or taking a nap, nothing would have come of Margaret’s adventure, and nothing would be known about it today. But on that spring day Mr. Underhill was away, and the activities next door were anything but ordinary. What Margaret saw was a series of rough-and-tumble sexual encounters between Mrs. Underhill and a man named Michael Fludd, scenes that Margaret was surprisingly able to follow even as the lovers moved from place to place within the tiny home. Once she saw what was going on, Margaret could have turned away, but she remained at the hole like a sentry at his post—watching and listening for an entire afternoon and some part of the evening. In an adultery trial, held just two weeks later, Margaret testified to everything, from the precise nature of each sexual maneuver to the couple’s pre- and post-coital banter.
