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Trevallion’s head are cooking hotter than those distiller’s vats. Father O’Brien’s right: I should play nice with Trevallion. Try to distract him, make him think of other things. Yes, we’ll do it that way; that’s how we can save the village. You’ll disappear before the week’s out. Go with your idiot friend to Wicklow on Saturday and just stay there. Then people will suspect you, and the tenants will be out of the woods.”
    “And you?” he asked. “I’m supposed to leave you alone with Trevallion?”
    Kathleen rolled her eyes. “God almighty, Michael, I’m not going to just give myself to him. I’ll walk with him through the village, butter him up a bit, give him some hope . . . and then I’ll come to Wicklow as soon as things have settled down. Just tell me where to find you.”
    Kathleen felt better having made this plan. This would work. But only if Michael played along.
    Michael chewed thoughtfully on his upper lip. He liked his plan much better. But the village was also his home. The people there were close to his heart. His mother and his siblings . . . but they’d be driven out of house and home anyway when the villagers pointed their fingers at Michael. That hurt Michael—but his mother knew where his father was waiting for them. True, she would no longer be able to pray at church every day, but in exchange, the children would surely get more to eat in the mountains.
    “All right, fine,” he said reluctantly. “A week, Kathleen, but not a day more. You’ll find me at Barney’s Tavern. It’s a bar on High Street; can’t miss it.”

    Trevallion used the “Week of Truth,” as he called it, to thoroughly mistreat the tenants. In the winter, there was little farm work to do, and the famine had so weakened the people that one could hardly ask anything of them. But that week, Trevallion made them all line up. They had to clean out the stables, haul rocks to expand the fences around the fields, and chop wood for the manor’s fireplace.
    “The fires need to be stoked, whether the lord’s here or not,” Trevallion explained. “Otherwise, mold will form in the walls. And the house can’t be allowed to cool down, lest His Lordship decide to spend Christmas here after all.”
    That had never happened, but now the villagers almost wished for it. Lord Wetherby might be more amenable to reason than his overzealous steward. Gráinne claimed the lady, at least, was reasonable. Indeed, Kathleen, too, had come to know the young noblewoman as a superficial but ultimately good-natured creature. Surely she would not sit idly by while her farmers’ children starved.
    Saturday evening, Michael was half-frozen and exhausted from breaking rocks in the cold when he finally fetched the gardener’s donkey. A few of the farmers watched him in silence, noting that this time Billy Rafferty was climbing onto the beast behind him.
    “Where do you think you’re going, Rafferty?” Ron Flannigan asked suspiciously. “A tour through the pubs in Wicklow? Do you have money to drink away, boy?”
    Michael shook his head and, pointing to the tin whistle in Billy’s pocket, answered for his friend. “I need him for the band, Ron. There’s more money to be made together. They hardly pay a fiddler on his own.”
    Flannigan furrowed his brow. “And so you take the worst whistle player? Who’s going to pay Billy for his playing? More like they’ll give him something to stop.”
    The farmers laughed.
    Michael laughed along. “People like the sound to be a bit rough around the edges,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”
    Ron Flannigan watched as they rode off. “Do you, now?” he finally murmured.
    Kathleen had a hard time flirting, but she forced herself to do just that with Trevallion. She smiled at him when he walked into church on Sunday. Father O’Brien preached about forgiveness and clemency. In the end, he concluded, only God was the true judge, and no sinner could escape him, even if he