The butter is now completely melted. Mother spoons it onto her bread. Asia watches as Rosalie lifts her hair, wipes her damp neck, and lets it fall again. A single drop of sweat runs along Asia’s spine, stopping at the band at her waist.

“Your father had a Northern spirit,” Mother says, red-faced in all her widow’s black. “A democratic spirit. No man in the North would ask to be called Master in his own house.”

However much he might like it, Asia thinks.

“John,” says Mother, “has a more delicate sensibility.”

Asia is a Northerner herself, which means that John must be one as well, but there is a transactional nature to Northern manners, a mercantilism that she dislikes and he finds abhorrent. It’s the Yankee way, she thinks, to value a thing only for the money it might make.

John’s own manners and opinions were formed by his classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. Brief as his time at that school was, it marked him for the South forever. He thinks he knows a superior sort of person when he sees one and to pretend otherwise is to dissemble.

Asia hears a man singing downstairs. He has a tenor voice, a voice so beautiful, she forgets everything else and sits, spoon in the air, listening.

In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,

In a corner obscure and alone

They have fitted a slab of granite so gray

And sweet Alice lies under the stone.

Asia thinks if there were a face to match that voice, a woman might fall in love. Not her, of course, but some other woman. Asia can imagine it perfectly.

“Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?”

Asia is struck by this observation. She repeats it to John when he comes in, late that night. He’s seated in a parlor chair, drinking a glass of their own cider. She’s holding his bare foot in her lap, puncturing a nasty blister on his heel with her embroidery needle, draining it into a rag.

John takes from it a lesson she didn’t intend. “Of course, the Irish understand nothing about the black race,” he says. It infuriates him, how they come to this country and vow to liberate the Negroes before they’ve even seen a black face. “Patrick in all his meddling ignorance. Nothing will destroy the American black faster than freedom.” He was exhausted when he came in. Now he’s agitated.

He empties his glass and stares into the fire. Asia wonders if he thinks of the prophecy Mother once saw in the flames as often as she does.

“You’re right,” she says. “The Irish don’t really understand what freedom means. They don’t grow up democratic.” And maybe she believes this, but maybe she’s just placating John, she’s not even sure.