Chapter 7: Calder Street

He woke to the sound of me setting the photograph on the pillow beside his head.

He saw it, and he saw my face, and he didn't say anything at all.

"Don't," I said. "Don't sit up and make a speech. I'm going to ask you questions, and you're going to answer them."

"Clem..."

"I know what that does to you. I know you'd rather I didn't."

He closed his eyes.

"Ask," he said.

I sat on the edge of the mattress with my knees together and my hands clamped between them.

"Why do you have a picture of my foster parents' house?"

"Because I was in the cellar."

The room tilted.

I remembered a cellar.

I remembered a damp stone floor, a jar that broke, and a pale man bleeding from a hole in his chest.

I had half remembered it for six years as smoke fever, the kind of thing the hospital said a lungful of smoke does to a brain.

"You're the man in the cellar."

"Yes."

"I gave you my blood."

"Yes."

"I said something."

"You said 'Then be mine, and don't die.'"

His voice was barely there.

"I have never heard anything so brave or so terrible."

I got up and went to the window, and I put my hand flat on the quilt.

"Did you start the fire?"

"No."

"Did it burn because of you?"

He took a long time.

"Yes."

My legs went, and I had to lean on the wall.

"I was dying in the street that night," he said, behind me.

"Someone in the Court had sent a man with a silver blade. I crawled through the nearest cellar window."

"Our window."

"There was a young woman in the cellar, fetching a jar of peaches."

"Her foster mother had let her stay on after she aged out."

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