The whole town of Millbrook stood in the snow and watched.
It was Christmas Eve in the year 1852. There were lamps in the square and a band and the smell of hot chestnuts. And in the middle of it all, a constable held a young woman by the arm.Her name was Lucy Ward. She worked in the hat shop, and the whole town had just heard her called a thief. She did not cry. She did not fight. She only stood very straight in her old brown coat with snow in her hair.Then the new Earl of Wexley pushed through the crowd. He did not look at the constable. He did not look at the fine lady who had called her a thief. He put his hand into his coat, and he took out a tiny gray mitten—a child's mitten, old and worn thin, so small it lay in the middle of his palm."Before anyone takes this woman anywhere," he said, "I want to ask her one question."To know what that question was and why one small mitten made a whole town go silent, we have to go back—back to the cold, dark mornings of that winter, back to a little room above a hat shop, and one candle and two needles that never stopped.Lucy Ward was twenty-seven years old. She had brown hair tied back tight. She had quick, sore fingers, and she had a small room above Mr. Pike's hat shop on the high street, where she worked six days a week for very little money. She sewed ribbons onto hats for rich ladies. She smiled at them. She said, "Yes, madam, the blue suits you very well." And the rich ladies never once looked at her face.Lucy did not mind. She had a secret, and it kept her warm.Every night when the shop was shut, she climbed the stairs to her little room. She lit one candle and she knitted: mittens, socks, small warm hats. She bought the cheapest wool in town, the odd ends and scraps that nobody else wanted. And out of them, all winter long, she made warm things for children.At the end of the high street stood St. Anne's Home for Children. Forty children lived there with no mother and no father. The house was old, the fires were small, and every winter the children's hands went red, and then blue, and then they cracked and bled.So every Friday before the sun came up, Lucy walked to St. Anne's, and in the dark she left a parcel on the back step. Then she walked away fast before anyone could see. She had done it for five winters.Inside every mitten, inside the cuff where no one would look, she sewed a tiny star in blue thread. It had five points, and one point was a little longer than the others. Her mother had taught her that. Her mother, Mary Ward, had knitted for poor children too, long ago before she died."The long point is not a mistake," her mother used to say. "It points home, so a child always knows there is someone somewhere who cares if they are warm."