Two women separated by centuries, the threads of their lives drawn together by one beautiful silk dress

Textiles historian Jo Baaker is drawn back to the Dutch island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a valuable seventeenth-century silk dress retrieved from a sunken shipwreck. Her research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress who served on the fringes of the Dutch court.

But how did Anna come to possess such a precious dress? Jo is determined to trace the threads and find out, all while battling with professional egos and personal demons.