The Good Wife — Mary Anne Butler

A handsome patent medicine peddler steals the heart of a young Virginia girl intent on breaking 19th century constraints that anchor women to home and hearth. But when a diamond and pearl ring links him to two violent crimes, sending him to jail, the devastated Lizzie leaves Baltimore and returns to her family.She marries a steady man for whom the Ohio frontier beckons. They leave a comfortable Maryland home to travel over the new National Road funded in 1806 by the Federal Government to encourage trade and settlement in the west. With hard work and terrible losses they finally establish a backwoods homestead in the new state.But when Lizzie's first love, the formidable, though ever charming, Edward reappears, his black bag of questionable medicines replaced by the tools of his new profession, Lizzie, now a comely matron of forty-six, is conflicted in ways she could never have imagined or anticipated.