Queen Anne's Lace

record, China,” Christine said. “It would be wonderful to have some documentation, and family collections often come with a list.” She picked up one of the early pieces, holding it up to the light for a better look. “Lace was such a precious luxury item, you know, and cherished. Pieces like these were handed down in the family and often mentioned in the owner’s will, or in an inventory of the family’s most important possessions. Lace could be the costliest part of a dress, and was frequently designed to be detachable—lace collars and cuffs, for instance—so it could be worn with several different garments.” She picked up another piece. “Until machine-made lace came along, lace signified a certain level of wealth and social sophistication, so it was prized. Just that little bit of adornment on your dress suggested that you had a refined taste and could appreciate the finer things. Larger pieces like this one”—she picked up the embroidered veil—“were often used ritually and passed down from one generation to the next. Because they weren’t in everyday use, they were a sign that you had enough money to buy something that you would use only once or twice in a lifetime. Or that you were an accomplished needlewoman and had the skill—and the free time—to make it yourself.” She smiled. “Of course, if you could spend your time making lace, somebody else had to be doing your family’s laundry and cooking your meals. There are layers of privilege here.”

A chuckle ran around the table. “You said something about pattern samples,” Lori said. “Are you thinking that some of these later pieces might have been work that was made for sale?”

Christine nodded. “It’s possible. In both Europe and America, women were seriously interested in lacework as a means of making money. It was something they could do at home—and in the right market, it might produce enough income to make a woman independent. Just last week, I ran across an article that was published in the New York Times in 1900, encouraging women to take up lacemaking as a business opportunity. Around that same time, lacemaking classes were being taught in Boston and Philadelphia.”

“But wasn’t there plenty of machine-made lace available by then?” Lori asked.

“Oh, yes,” Christine said. “Machine-made laces had simply eclipsed handmade lace by the turn of the twentieth century. But that didn’t mean that women stopped making lace—luckily, because when machines came along, the craft was in danger of dying out.”

“I suppose the machine-manufactured lace made handcrafted lace that much more valuable,” I said. “Which might have encouraged people to do it.”

“Exactly,” Christine agreed. “In some communities, women got together and produced laces for sale—sort of like a co-op. Their success, of course, depended on whether they were able to find a reliable market for their work. That might have happened around here, I suppose. A group of craftswomen could have produced lace for sale in Austin or San Antonio—especially in San Antonio, where there was a community of wealthy Spanish women and a great many Catholics. Lace has always been important for religious vestments and altar cloths. The women might also have sent their work to Dallas or Galveston. Until the 1900 hurricane wiped it out, Galveston was a more important social and business center than Houston.”

“I wonder if that’s what we have here,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe the Pecan Springs Historical Society knows something about it.”

“That’s why it would be so good to have documentation,” Christine said. “I recently learned about a lacemaking group of a half dozen women in Dallas in the early 1900s. We were lucky with that group, for one of the women wrote letters to her sister describing her work, and the letters were saved. In the late 1800s, in several Catholic orphanages around the state, the nuns who had come from lacemaking centers in Ireland or Western Europe taught the girls to make lace. They were hoping to give them a skill that might help them earn money later in their lives.” She paused, looking down at the pieces spread on the table. “I’d like to take these back to my office and photograph them for more study, if you don’t mind. Some of the patterns are a bit unusual.”

Ruby had been listening intently. Now, with the tip of her finger, she pushed the black lace collar toward Christine. “Tell us about this piece,” she said. She sounded hesitant, and I remembered what had happened when she had picked it up the day before.

“Well, it’s a crocheted collar, as you can see,” Christine said. “It was made to be worn with an important dress, probably sometime before 1900. It’s black, so it’s probably a mourning collar. Women typically wore deep mourning—black—for at least a year.” She smiled a little. “It was a practice that was begun, formally, with Queen Victoria. She wore mourning for forty years after Prince Albert died. She made widowhood socially respectable, you know. Until then, widows were often social exiles.”

“There’s something else,” Ruby said softly. “You may think this is silly, but I’ve heard that sometimes traumatic events can create a psychic imprint on an item or object, sort of like . . . well, like energy fingerprints. When we invest a great deal of attention and emotion in something, we leave a deep impression on it. And that impression stays, even after we’re dead.” Gingerly, she touched the collar again. “Yesterday, when I picked this up, I suddenly felt as if I had lost . . . well, everything. I felt I was drowning in sadness. If this was worn for a long time by someone who was in deep mourning, that makes perfect sense—at least to me.”

Christine raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly, and I expected her to pooh-pooh Ruby’s remark. But she didn’t.

“Other historians might not agree with me,” she said. “But I’ve worked with women’s clothing long enough to understand its importance. We care deeply about the clothes we wear, especially when we spend a great deal of time