The Street That Spoke Names

He ran the whole crooked length of the lane and up the chandler's stairs three at a time, and burst into the warm small rooms with the fog still smoking off his coat — and there sat Sera by the lamp, needle paused, her face turning up to him in mild surprise. "Papa? You're white as a sheet. Whatever is the matter?" He could not say it. He gathered her hands instead, the clever needle-pricked fingers, and held them, and told himself the flame had lied, that flames knew nothing, that he would sit with her through the night and prove the cobbles wrong. But he had buried a cooper and a child and an old woman on the strength of those whispers, and he knew, in the marrow of him, that Marrow Lane did not lie. He thought through the long terrible options a father thinks through. He could lock the door. He could keep her from the window, from the stove, from the stairs. But the flame had not told him *how*, only *who*, and a thing that means to take a person before dawn will find a hundred small doors into a house. He had seen that too. So toward midnight, when she slept at last, he did the only thing a respectable man could think to do: he went back to the lamp. He set his ladder against the third column and climbed to where the mantle breathed its small certain light, and he spoke to it as he had never spoken to anything, low and courteous, hat in his hand though the fog soaked