Although it was past midday, barely a shadow clung to the sheds and storage barns that lined the narrow yard. With summer days long, the sun was only now beginning its descent toward the western horizon where it would do battle with the great troop of clouds gathered there. Given the many hours yet left until nightfall, Haydon’s servants should still have been rushing about, hard at their tasks. But no industrious sound echoed within Haydon’s inner walls beyond the ringing of the smith’s hammer. Instead, everyone who should have toiled danced just outside the garden’s wall. Laughing laundresses clasped hands with grinning stable lads while seamstresses, out of the housekeeper’s sight for the dinner hour, ran rings about off-duty soldiers. Why, even the guards on the walls turned their backs to their watches to observe the merriment of those below them. Such frantic gaiety out here was but the promise of even more happy activity in the garden. Kate’s stomach twisted. The thought of plastering a smile on her face and joining the women when she had to marry Sir Gilbert DuBois was more mummery than she could manage.
