Queen Anne's lace sprig on the upper arm

By noon the bobbins were clicking and the pins stood in the pricking like a row of soldiers. Each flower on the pattern was built from a hundred tiny picots, and the feathery leaves had to be fine enough to let the light through. By the third hour her forefinger had gone sore against the card, and a bead of red rose on the skin. She wiped it on her apron and kept going, because the Westcott order was owed by Friday and nobody in the cottage had money for a second cloth.

The bead dried in the cold and left a speck on the linen. Her grandmother found it at dusk and said nothing, only unpinned the length and turned it to the window. By morning the speck sat at the heart of one flower, a dark point in all that white, and the squire's wife, who had ordered plain sprays, paid double for it.

Nell never said where the colour came from, so the village invented its own reasons. Every June after, when the ditches frothed white along Sheepwash Lane, she walked the hedge with her grandmother's scissors and cut only the flowers with a dark mote at the centre. Her lace, she liked to say, was always paid for in a little blood, and she never once let a buyer see the wound.