I glanced back through the door to see if Mrs. Birkett was ready to check out, but she was still browsing. “What’s the message?”
Ruby stood up and stretched her arms over her head, then bent to one side and then the other, pulling the kinks out of her back. She was wearing a yellow top and a pair of floral-print palazzo pants. She looked like a bright ray of sunshine in a flower garden. “It’s about a photo Lori sent her. A baby’s dress, I think she said.”
“Oh, that one,” I said. “It’s a christening dress, very pretty, with a panel of embroidered lace down the front. Lori showed it to me yesterday.” I paused, and something occurred to me. “Maybe Lori didn’t get a chance to tell you. She located her adoptive aunt on Ancestry dot-com, and she drove up to Waco to meet her. The big news is that her aunt was actually able to give Lori the name of her birth mother.”
Ruby grinned delightedly. “No, I didn’t know!” She sat down on her stool again. “China, that’s wonderful! She must be very happy.”
I nodded. “Her aunt also gave her the christening dress that had been handed down in her birth mother’s family. Lori was meant to wear it, apparently, but her adoptive aunt held on to it. Ask Lori to tell you the story. A classic family feud.” I tilted my head on one side. “So what’s the message?”
Ruby frowned. “Christine was in a hurry, and she was talking so fast that I’m not sure I understood everything.” She paused. “If I got it right, it had to do with the baby’s lace cap that was in the wooden chest we found in the storeroom. Remember it?”
I nodded. “I remember a baby’s cap, a lady’s cap, some collars—”
“Yes, all that lace stuff. Well, Christine said she couldn’t be sure until she sees the actual baby’s dress, but she thinks the pattern in the photo Lori sent yesterday might be the same as the pattern in the baby’s lace cap. She thinks the two pieces might be a cap and gown set.”
“The same pattern, maybe. But a set?” I said doubtfully. “That would be a long shot. The christening dress came from a small town north of Little Rock, which is a long way from Central Texas.”
Ruby shrugged. “Sorry. I don’t have a clue. You’ll have to ask Christine. Anyway, she wants us to tell Lori that she’ll be back from her trip early next week. She hopes Lori will let her have the baby dress so she can do some testing.”
I hesitated, wondering whether to tell Ruby what Ethel had seen in the garden that morning. But she had already gone back to her stock orders. Anyway, Ethel’s now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t Gibson girl was every bit as improbable as the ghostly rearrangement of my bulletin board—and I hadn’t yet told Ruby about that. It was the kind of thing that should wait until we could sit down with a cup of tea and no distractions, when we could sort all this crazy stuff out.
So I went back to the shop, where Mrs. Birkett had found what she wanted, and rang up the book she was buying. A member of the Pecan Springs Herb Society and a lifelong Crockett Street resident, she is deeply interested in traditional medicine.
“I’m also looking for something about the history of women’s personal uses of herbs,” she said in her scratchy, high-pitched voice.
“Personal uses?” I asked.
“Yes.” She took her checkbook out of her purse. “These days, we talk about family planning as if it’s something new. But it’s not, you know. Women planned their families back then—when to have babies, how many, how often. But they used the plants their mothers and grandmothers told them about, not some fancy prescription they got from a doctor. My grandmother knew a lot about that.”
“It’s interesting that you should ask,” I said. “I’m writing an article for the newspaper about Queen Anne’s lace—one of the herbs women used to manage their fertility. Along with tansy and rue and artemisia. It’s a fascinating subject.”
“Oh, good—I’ll look for that.” Mrs. Birkett smiled at me. “My grandmother would have loved you, China.” With arthritic fingers, she finished writing out the check. “She would have loved your shop and especially your gardens.” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “She had a big herb garden herself, you know, just a block or so down the street, at the very house where I live now. She sold herbs to the village ladies, and she kept the pharmacy supplied. She worked with herbs until she was well into her nineties. When I was just a little girl, she let me play in what she called her stillroom. She said the word comes down from the time when a room in a manor house was set aside for distilling cordials and brewing beer and making medicines—all that sort of thing.”
“How marvelous,” I said enviously. “It must have been fun, growing up with a grandmother who had an old-fashioned stillroom.”
Mrs. Birkett’s faded blue eyes grew a little misty. “Oh, my dear, it was! I lived in her house when I was a young girl, and moved back there again after my dear husband died. Come see me sometime and I’ll show you her equipment. It’s all antique now, of course.” She giggled. “Like me. I’m another antique.”
“I’d love to do that.” I did a quick mental calculation. If old Mrs. Birkett had
