The Lacemaker's Secret

Purchase link

Weaving a tale between current day events and the arrival of Belgian settlers to Wisconsin, Kathleen Ernst provides valuable insight into their hardships, their triumphs and tragedies. In The Lacemaker's Secret Curator Chloe Ellefson accepts a consulting job at Green Bay's Heritage Hill Historical Park where an old Belgian-American farmhouse is being restored.

Her love of history and restoration takes her to many interesting places, but this time she is in for more than historical re-creation.

On her way to the B&B where she is staying, she spots what looks like a bake house oven. Her curiosity overwhelms her good sense and she clambers over the deserted farmland to see what she can see. What she finds is a body stuffed and locked in the bake oven. The body turns out to be Hugh LeJeune, owner of the property. He is the uncle of the B&B owner where Chloe is staying, but no one knows why he would be murdered.


The story flashes back to the early days in Belgium for two sisters recently orphaned. They are Seraphine and Octavie Moreau and are sent to the school of the Apostoline Sisters in Bruges where they are taught the art of Belgian bobbin lacemaking. Seraphine dreams of being able to make a living as a lacemaker and when her fiance Jean-Paul Lejeune asks her to leave with him for America in 1849, she agrees, not knowing what is in store from them when they arrive in the forests of Wisconsin.

As Chloe researches the Heritage Hill Historical Park, she finds her research overlapping the history of the Belgian immigrants including Seraphine Lejeune and lacemaking. When Chloe's co-worker goes missing, Chloe is sure there is a connection between the murder and the disappearance.

An exceptional historical telling of the lives of Belgian immigrants and the female lacemakers in the late 1850s and the hardships they endured to keep the craft alive and survive the wilderness.