The letters are making Kate angry.

She's worked hard, for nearly two years at this point, to keep the village on an even keel. She's turned the inn from a rundown, empty building that people came and went from to the heart of the community; she's scrubbed floors and dishes, woken up at dawn and gone to bed well after sundown all to work and keep it all going. To keep people as content as they can, to make sure they don't turn on each. She stands up at town meetings and goes toe-to-toe with big, angry men, and these letters are infuriating her.

It's too small a community to survive some serious violence, or a murder committed from one to another, without serious work, and she's bloody tired of work.

Which might make it strange that her first thought, when seeing Mr Gracchus with the bolt of fabric, is to welcome the idea of work as a distraction from the looming other work. But needlework as always left the mind free to think, and ther's a degree of sanctification in making things.

"What beautiful fabric," Kate says, putting down her bucket of water and walking over to him.