I gazed out over the sea for a minute. “I just think of him as faceless, but it could be a white mask, or bandages, or as you say, heavy makeup. Like those dancers we saw in Japan, only without the features accentuated. He's just . . . faceless.” It was frustrating, trying to grasp a thing so firmly lodged in the dim recesses of the mind.

“And he appears in a white room.”

“Yes, always.”

“Tell me about the room.”

“It's brightly lit, windowless, and crowded with an odd assortment of furnishings.” I had already decided that this room was a place of importance to my subconscious mind, which had furnished it with elements from all the sides of my life. An almost mythic place, as it were, a sort of Platonic cave.

“But not the same as the locked rooms of the third dream.”

“Oh, no, nothing like. Those are dim and solid, this is bright and, I don't know, soft somehow.” Womblike, I thought—other than the brightness.

“Ah,” he said, and bit down on his pipe-stem with an air I knew well: The case was coming together in his mind.

For some reason, that gesture made me uneasy; I got to my feet to walk over to the railing, looking down at the lower decks, refusing to rise to his bait.

“It's a tent,” he said after a minute.

“From my childhood? Not very likely, Holmes—my mother wouldn't have been caught dead tenting. We did have a summer house, south of San Francisco, and although we left the servants behind when we went there, it was a far cry from roughing it.”

“Not a holiday. Following the earthquake and fire, the parks of San Francisco were covered with the canvas tents of refugees.”

“I told you, I wasn't there during the earthquake.”

“So where were you?”

“I don't remember—I was six years old, for heaven's sake, and we moved around. England, most likely. Or Boston. Not in San Francisco.”

“You were born in London, and lived in California fourteen years later; were you not resident in between?”

“On and off. Not the whole time,” I said, far more decisively than I felt. Did anyone pay much attention to memories of childhood? Personally, I rarely thought about them.

“Where did you live when you were six years old, Russell?” he asked patiently.

“Oh, Holmes, leave it, do.”

“Where, Russell?”

God, was the man out to drive me mad? “Boston, I think.”

“Do you recall the house?”

“Yes,” I said triumphantly, and turned to face him, my chin high. “A large brick mansion with a portico, a pianoforte in the parlour, and a stained-glass window over the stairway landing that used to cast its colours on the walls.”

“Your house, or that of your grandparents?”