I pull them out and hold them up. “Weren’t you just whipped for this?” I say. I don’t mean to shout but my frustration makes me loud.

She drops to her knees and cowers at my feet. I’m sick when I see that, but I feel worse when she speaks, “Please, Master Taylor. Don’t whip me for this. I’m sorry. I won’t never touch it again. Please, don’t whip me.”

I lower my hands and my voice. I would never take a lash to her. But that’s not what she sees. She sees a white angry man. To her, I’m one of the masters.

I want to tell her I’m not like those others.

I’d never do those things to her.

I’m Irish, not American; the oppressed, not the oppressor.

She looks at me the way I used to look at the English. All of them the same and none of them good. She won’t believe me different until she sees me acting different. I can’t expect it otherwise.

“I’ll not be having you whipped,” I say.

She doesn’t look like she trusts me, but she stops her yammering.

“And I’ll not report you for taking them.” I reach down and help her to her feet. “But why did you?” I ask. “They’re no use to you.”

She pinches her lips together, but she’s got the look of someone itching to speak her mind, consequence be damned. I wait her out until she does.

“Ain’t about using something,” she says. “It’s about having it be mine.”

In her cabin, there’s almost nothing. It’s as bare as the hut of a starving tenant farmer. We’re not so different, her and me. She steals just to have it. For someone who’s been told she can’t own anything, not even herself, filching is a kind of victory.

The one time Lord Edwards came up from England to survey his land and see for himself what “all the fuss over starving Irish” was about, he came by our place on his fine horse with his glossy dogs yapping at his heels. There was nowhere to tie his horse since all the shrubs and trees were long cut down for wood—for ages we’d mostly burned moss and dung—so he handed me the reins and told me to hold her. As Da explained about the years of rotten potatoes, and how the work gangs weren’t enough, and the disease-filled workhouse a death sentence, and that people were evicted from land and homes they’d held for generations, and how homeless families slept in ditches, his lordship’s dog started barking and didn’t stop. To shut it up, he reached into his saddle bag, took out a bread roll and tossed it to the dog. Then he turned back to Da and told him to keep explaining, but Da couldn’t say a word more. When you’ve seen that, there’s nothing more to say. Riled up by his silence, Lord Edwards called him lazy and ungrateful and said we deserved what was coming. That’s when I slipped my hand in the saddle bag feeling for food. Instead of bread, my fingers wrapped around a silver flask. I slipped it under my shirt. When I handed his horse back, I looked him right in the eyes. He slapped me for being “an impertinent oaf,” and I thought, if he comes again, I’ll steal the whole damn horse.