I took a volume at random from the shelves before me, spoiling their pristine order, walked around the bed to turn off the bed-side light, then went out of the door, shutting it quietly but firmly, and descending the stairs to the kitchen.

I settled at the table with my fresh tea and the book, but I did not open it. Instead, I stared over the top of my cup at the shelves that were also a door and at the tea canister that was a lever, not really seeing either.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Mr Long's suggestion had been in the right direction: The concealed apartment was in no earthly mansion, but rather lay within the walls of Matteo Ricci's memory palace, and the reason I could let myself into it with such ease (at least, I could in my dream) was because I had placed it there myself: built it, closed the door on it, turned the key in its lock. The hidden apartment was my past, the childhood I had locked away and forgotten almost completely under physical pain coupled with the shock of abandonment and the wretchedness of guilt. I alone, the least worthy of the four Russells, had survived: better by far to walk unburdened and amnesiac from the desert of my past than to carry around the lush memories of what I had lost.

Yesterday my intellect had begun to accept the meaning; nonetheless, that morning's version of the dream had all but shouted at me, “It's not that simple.”

Not that the interpretation was wrong, just that an intellectual recognition did not take it far enough.

A badly burnt creature will forever shy away from fire; until two weeks ago I had shied away from my past, denying the very possibility that I had gone through the events of 1906, allowing it to remain concealed behind the later trauma of the accident.

And yet, the victim of fire often remains perversely fascinated with flame, incapable of leaving it alone. And so my scarred mind had found reason to bring me, first to San Francisco itself, and then to this lakeside retreat by way of a piece of road that I'd had no intention of revisiting: Unwanted journeys all, yet each step of the way, each painful brush of memory, had brought to me a degree of mastery and self-respect. The prod of one object after another in the Pacific Heights house had made me wince, but I had also felt the dormant pieces of my past begin to unfurl and come alive within.

Then, when I had begun the journey down the Peninsula, the process of memory had changed. To use the image my dream had provided, this place had been an entire self-contained apartment, fully furnished with the people and events of the past, waiting for me to step inside and finally claim it.