would cause my heart to stop.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Watching my wife go over the rail of a ship, however, might have done the job.”
“I was only—”
“You were three degrees from overbalancing.” His hard voice brooked no argument, and although that in itself would not normally have prevented me from arguing, at the moment all I could think of was my inadvertent shudder at the alluring smoothness of the ship's wake.
When I did not answer, he sighed. “Russell, clearly something is tormenting your mind. And while I firmly believe that all persons should be allowed to wrestle with their own demons, it is nonetheless possible that two minds working in tandem on the problem might have more effect than one tired mind on its own.”
“Yes, very well,” I snapped. I set my feet onto the deck, then spent some time studying my hands while the words arranged themselves in my mind. “When I suggested that after Bombay we should go to San Francisco, it seemed a logical idea. My business in California is best served by my presence, and . . . Well, I thought it a means of saying my farewells, which I was in no condition to do when I left ten years ago. But I am finding that the nearer we get, the more I wish we'd just turned for home. I . . . I find I am dreading the entire thing.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “It is quite natural that you do not wish to go to San Francisco.”
“What do you mean?” I protested, stung. “It's taken me days to admit to myself that I was wrong, yet you claim to have known all along?”
“I do not say you are wrong, merely that you are torn. Russell, the moment we turned for California you became irritable, insomniac, restless, and without appetite. When we paused in Japan, your troubles were suspended—you slept, ate, and concentrated as you normally do—but when we resumed our easterly progress, they began again. What else could it be? Some curious aversion to the ship itself? I think that unlikely.”
I could only stare at him, openmouthed, until his face twisted in a moue of impatience. “Russell, we are sailing on a straight path for the place that holds the most troubling memories of your childhood. It is only natural that you feel concern about seeing the place that burned to the ground when you were six—yes, yes, you weren't there, but even if you were not present you would have been told about it, over and over. Furthermore, it is the place where, at the age of fourteen, you experienced the horrendous crash that killed your mother, your father, your brother, and nearly you. It would be decidedly odd if you were not fearful. What concerns me is that your degree of apprehension seems excessive. Those dreams, whatever their message, clearly spring from powerful roots.”
“But these dreams have nothing to do with the accident. They're nothing like the Dream I used to have when I was a child—the one I told you about. There's no motorcar, no family. No fire or explosion, no road or cliffs. Not the same at all.”
He thrust the scrap of orange into one pocket, then drew his pipe from another and started packing tobacco into its bowl. As he rolled the top of the pouch shut, he remarked, “This faceless man of the second dream. He seems to alarm but not threaten.”
“That's a fair description, yes.”
“He does not reach for you, or harm you in any way?”
“He just appears, says ‘Don't be frightened, young lady,' and leaves.”
He paused with the brass lighter halfway to the bowl, and two sharp grey eyes locked on to me.
“That was the phrase you used the first time you told me.”
“Well, it scarcely matters.”
“I shouldn't assume that,” replied my husband, in his customary irritatingly enigmatic style, and concentrated on getting the tobacco burning. When he had done so, he let out a fragrant cloud and sat back, his legs stretched out before him. “What do you suppose it means by his being faceless? Is it literal, or is something obscuring his features—a mask of some kind, perhaps, or heavy makeup?”
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?”
“Ours, of course.” But the moment I said this, the stairway in memory became populated with a number of small white dogs, their fluffy bodies spattered magically with blue and red from the window. My grandmother's dogs.
No: I must have seen that when Grandmother came to visit.
Bringing her dogs with her? Reluctantly, I prodded at the memory, trying to locate a bedroom or nursery I could call my own; all I came up with was an uncomfortable trundle bed in a room that smelt of lavender.
Damnation. Why couldn't I remember such a simple thing?
My fingernails located a rough place on the wooden railing, and began to worry at it. “Honestly, Holmes? I don't know.”
“Russell, I propose that in all likelihood you were, in fact, in San Francisco during the earthquake. That would explain the flying objects in the first dream, don't you think? And the soft white walls of the crowded room, a tent
