Project Gutenberg, the wonderful online store of out-of-copyright books, includes a rather odd autobiographical tale, “Seven wives and seven prisons”, published by a doctor called L.A. Abbott in New York in 1870.

Wife number three on the author’s list was one Sarah Scheimer and it’s his description of her seduction that drew the book to my attention:

Now just across the Delaware river, nine miles above Easton, Penn., lived a wealthy Dutch farmer, named Scheimer… The youngest daughter, Sarah, eighteen years old, was an accomplished and beautiful girl…

I had not been in the Scheimer family three months before I fell in love with the daughter Sarah and she returned my passion. She promised to marry me, but said there was no use in saying anything to her parents about it; they would never consent on account of the disparity in our ages, for I was then forty years old; but she would marry me nevertheless, if we had to run away together.

They conspired to elope, arranging to meet by the local river:

The next day, at the appointed time, I was at the ferry–Sarah, as I learned afterwards, left the house at a much earlier hour to “take a walk” and while she was, foolishly I think, making a circuitous route to reach the ferry, her father, who suspected that she intended to run away, went to the ferryman and told him his suspicions, directing him if Sarah came there by no means to permit her to cross the river. Consequently when Sarah met me at the ferry, the ferryman flatly refused to let either of us go over…

While we were pressing the ferryman to favor us, down came one of Sarah’s brothers with a dozen neighbors, and told her she must return home or he would carry her back by force.

The fiancées quickly hatched a plan: she would go home and announce that they had broken off the relationship; he would stay in a local inn for a week, then come and steal her away:

We timed our journey so as to arrive there at one o’clock in the morning. Ever since her attempt to elope, Sarah had been watched night and day, and to prevent her abduction by me, Mr. Scheimer had two or three men in the house to stand guard at night.

Sarah was locked in her room, which is precisely what we had provided for, for no one in the house supposed that she could escape by the window….

Sarah was watching, and when I made the signal she opened the window and threw out her ready prepared bundle. Then my man and I set the ladder and she came safely to the ground. A moment more and we would have stolen away, when, as ill luck would have it, the ladder fell with a great crash, and the infernal dog, that a moment before seemed almost in our confidence, set up a howl and then barked loud enough to wake the dead.

Forthwith issued from the house old Scheimer, two of his sons and his hired guard-a half dozen in all. There was a time then. The girl was instantly seized and taken into the house…

How we ever got away I hardly know now, but presently we found ourselves in the road running for our lives, and running also for the carriage we had concealed in the woods, half a mile above…

He fled to New York. The romantics amongst you will be pleased to hear that he and Sarah did later manage to escape together and marry; the perverts amongst you will be fascinated to learn what had happened after her return home that night:

It seems that when her father and his gang returned from pursuing me, as they did a little way up the road towards Belvidere, they found her almost frantic. They locked her up in her room that night with no one to say so much as a kind word to her. How she passed that night, after the scenes she had witnessed, and the abuse with which her father and brothers had loaded her before they thrust her into her prison, may be imagined.

The next day she was wrought up to a frenzy. Her parents pronounced her insane, and called in a Dutch doctor who examined her and said she was “bewitched!” And this is the remedy he proposed as a cure; he advised that she should be soundly flogged, and the devil whipped out of her.

Her family, intensely angered at her for the trouble she had made them, or rather had caused them to make for themselves, were only too glad to accept the advice. The old man and two sons carried a sore bruise or two apiece they got from me the night before, and seized the opportunity to pay them off upon her. So they stripped her bare, and flogged her till her back was a mass of welts and cuts, and then put her to bed.