The Serpent's Shadow (5 page)

When the young ones finally ran out of chatter, Maya caught the eyes of their parents. “The lady who called will be my client, and will send her friends,” she told them, and was rewarded with smiles and no little relief. “All will be well on that score.”

“Ha!” Gupta said, looking wise. “It is well, mem sahib. Your father, blessed be his memory, would be pleased.”

Privately Maya doubted that her father would have been pleased to learn that his daughter was the physician to music-hall singers and the kept mistresses of wealthy men, but she said nothing to Gupta on that score. Nigel Witherspoon, whether he was in the Christian Heaven that Maya had been brought up to believe in, or on Surya's karmic wheel of reincarnation, was no longer in a position to judge what Maya did. And Maya saw nothing sinful in what
she was
doing.
I am hardly in a position to judge them, after all
,
no matter what the vicar at the Fleet Clinic says. I will heal the sick and leave it to Christ to judge. And since He kept company with thieves and prostitutes, I doubt very much that He would so much as raise an eyebrow at what I am doing.

She turned her attention back to the conversation. Gopal was planning a celebratory dinner and required her to make some choices. Not all the dishes were from India—in fact, the party would have a rather eclectic mix of Indian, British, and French dishes, for Gopal was trading lessons in Indian cuisine for those in Continental cooking with an expatriate Parisian cook he had come to be acquainted with.
For all I
know, she realized with amusement,
it might be the very own chef of a Member of Parliament!

No British household would eat as they were doing tonight, with everything on the low table at once, and everyone helping himself; Maya hadn't actually had meals like this when her father was alive, at least not since she'd come out of the nursery. They'd always kept to proper manners, as absurd as that was with only three of them—later, two—at the long formal table, with servants attending and each course being removed as the next was brought in. But she'd begun dining with the others for comfort and company after he died, and kept on with it. Who was to see or care? Much better to have converted the dining room to a sick room; any seriously ill patient Maya wanted to keep an eye on would find she had excellent care here.

It would be a “she,” of course. Maya doubted she'd get any male patients. This part of London was hardly the abode of the respectable middle class, but those who lived here were not so desperate that they couldn't make a choice in physicians. This wasn't the neighborhood of the poorest of the poor—not the Fleet, not Cheapside, and dear God, not Whitechapel. This was barely the East End.
On the other hand, you never know.
The working-class poor who lived here were also pragmatic; a man
might
bend his stiff neck to take the help of a woman doctor....

Especially since I'm one of them, in a sense.
But a man of this neighborhood would recover at home, tended by his own womenfolk. Only a woman needed to be kept here, lest she go back (or be driven back) to her wifely duties too soon.

The children finished their meal and ran up to the nursery. The other adults finished theirs and began to clean up. Maya took a cup of tea out with her to the conservatory, walking softly. All the other pets were asleep, but Nisha the owl was wide awake, and flew down, soundlessly, to perch on the back of a chair. A pigeon feather caught at the side of her beak told Maya that Nisha had already dined. Maya scratched her just under her beak and around her neck, a caress which the owl suffered for a moment before dipping her head and flying back up to her roost. Maya smiled; was there
anything
so soft as an owl's feathers?

It was time to make the nightly rounds. Not for the first time, Maya wished that her mother had taught her some of the secrets of her own native magic, and the enchantments and protections that she had learned in her temple, before she died.

“
I cannot
,”
she had said
,
her eyes dark with distress, whenever Maya begged.
“
Yours is the magic of your father's blood
,
not mine
.”

And she had never had the chance to explain what that meant.

Maya gazed up at the blank, black glass of the conservatory roof before she left her sanctum to circle the interior walls of the house. Even if the sky had not been overcast, it was unlikely that she would be able to see more than the very brightest of stars and the moon. How she missed the skies of home, where the stars hung like jeweled lamps in an ebony dome!

All the magic Maya knew had been learned by covertly spying on her mother as the former priestess spun protections for her family, or cobbled together from street magic gleaned from the few genuine fakirs, then compounded from a mixture of instinct, guess, and trial and error. She had woven a web of street-charm protections over this house and its occupants; every night she strengthened them, going over them three times to replace where the erosions of time and this city weakened them.

Three times she walked through each room of the first floor, in the dim light coming from the gaslights outside, or the light from the hall, bolstering her charms. There was no sign that anything had put those protections to the test, but would she be able to tell if anything had just probed at them rather than trying to destroy them?

I don't know
....

With a determined shake of her head, she thrust away the doubt. This was not the time to worry about her abilities; doubt made magic weak. That much, at least, she knew.

Besides, now that she had completed her protections, the charms she worked next were the ones she was sure of. Prosperity on the surgery and office and the front door, health on the kitchen, peace on the house itself. She smiled to herself as she heard the children above in the nursery mute their quarrel over a game into an amiable disagreement. Not that her charm stopped all quarrels; it was most effective right after it was first cast, and like the protections, it eroded a little with time and stress. But it did make life easier on everyone living here, making everyone a little more inclined to forgive and sweetening tempers.

Now her last, and easiest, work of the evening. She returned to the conservatory and spent a little time on each and every plant, strengthening it, encouraging it to grow at a rate much faster than “normal,” and giving it the extra energy to do so. Once the trees, plants, and bushes were tall and strong enough to suit her, vigorous enough to cover the walls and give her the complete illusion of a tiny jungle, she would let them grow at their own pace. Until that time, she would use her own strength to build her sanctuary, the sanctuary she needed so desperately in this alien place.

It wearied her; it always did. When she was done, Nisha called her softly. She hooted at the owl comfortingly and blew out the candle-lamps as she left, so that the conservatory descended into the sweet, warm darkness her pets all loved.

She closed herself in her office to study, with the murmur of voices within the house and the sounds of wheels on cobblestones outside as a soothing counterpart to her reading. Her father had never scrimped on medical texts and journals, and neither would she. There was so much to learn! It seemed that not a week passed but that some new medical discovery was heralded. Some were nonsense, of course; she had an advantage over her colleagues in that she could tell if a treatment for an illness or injury was actually doing any good. X-ray photography was a boon, if one could keep the patient still enough—but electrical stimulation was stuff and nonsense. She could tell easily enough with her own special senses that the patient got no more benefit from it than from any other nostrum in which he
truly believed.
Belief was a powerful medicine, ofttimes more powerful than any pill or potion she could offer.

As for sanitary surgery, she already felt that simply boiling instruments before surgery was nowhere near enough. Although she had had no say in the matter when she operated or assisted under the supervision of one of Royal Free's senior surgeons, from now on she would have a nurse spritzing the patient and the hands of those operating on him with dilute carbolic acid during her surgeries. Dr. Lister was right, and he would save many, many lives with his ideas, if he could get other physicians to implement them.

Tonight she studied gas gangrene. It was not the sort of literature that anyone but a small percentage of people on this island would even consider for after-dinner reading, and only a minuscule number of those would think it suitable under any conditions for a woman. Maya didn't care; she wanted to see if there was any hint in the current papers that her carbolic-acid atomizer would prevent the spread of this fearful condition. By the time she finished for the evening, with the clock on the mantle over the unused fire striking eleven, she had come to the conclusion that it would help, but no more. If only there were thin, flexible gloves available, impermeable to those tiny creatures Louis Pasteur had discovered as the root cause of infection and disease! Then a surgeon could operate without fear that the dread
bacteria
would enter some tiny nick or cut on her hands!

But India rubber was too thick and became sticky when warm, lambskin and eelskin little better than bare hands, for they required seams and, once used, could not be used again. Washing, with soap and carbolic, before and after, thoroughly and exhaustively: that was the only preventative, and that a shallow one. But she could not let fear keep her from trying to save lives.

She rubbed her eyes and shut the cover of the latest issue of
The Lancet,
marveling that there were still so many men who dared to call themselves doctors who refused to believe that bacteria caused infection.

How could they not? In the face of all the evidence?
She had never had a doubt, and never would have had, even without the evidence of her own very special senses that informed her of the work of those tiny, evil lives, glowing like sickly yellow coals, spreading through her patients' bodies like an ugly stain.

I can sense them
,
but there is so little that magic can do against them.
Not even Surya had been able to prevail against the tiny lives that had devoured her own, and Surya's magic had been a tower, a monument, compared to the pitifully small and ragged prominence that was her daughter's. Magic could strengthen the body that fought disease, but it could not kill the disease, not when it was one that moved with the terrible swiftness of the cholera that had claimed Surya.

Maya clenched her jaw and swallowed hard; she squeezed her eyes tightly against the burning behind her lids, and fought the tears away.

“Enough,” she said aloud, and pushed the chair away from the desk. Turning out the light, she went back out into the hall, closing the office door quietly behind her.

The house was quiet, except for the creakings and whispers of any house, new or old, as wood rubs against wood and whispers of draft creep under sills. Gupta and the rest must have gone to bed, which was where Maya would be shortly.

She turned out each light as she passed it to save the fragile bulb: the hallway downstairs, the light over the staircase, then the light just outside her door. Closing her door behind her, she leaned against it with her back to the wood for a moment and rubbed her eyes again. It was dark here, but she moved instinctively across the floor to the electric lamp beside her bed and turned the key to bring it to life.

This was a comfortable room. Quite small, it had probably been intended for a child, but Gopal and Sumi needed the much larger master bedroom, so despite their protests, Maya had insisted they take it. She had not been able to bring her furniture from home, but plenty of far wealthier folk who had gone to India and returned had brought furniture back with them, and there was a great deal of it in the flea markets at bargain prices after they tired of it. So here there were no lace curtains, no rose-garden carpets. The colors of home hung at the windows in vivid swags of red and yellow and orange muslin; the floor was covered with a worn silk rug figured like a Persian garden. The walls, painted white, played backdrop to a carved lacework of wooden panels with geometric embroidered tapestries, or hangings figured with the tree of life. The same carved wood supported her bed, made up the table beside it, and framed the cushions of a chair. Two sandalwood chests, one at the foot of her bed and the other at the window, and a wardrobe held her clothing; sandalwood boxes held her jewelry.

There wasn't much of that left; Surya had bequeathed her daughter a small fortune of gold and gems, but most of it had gone to bring them all to London, build this house, and keep them until now. Not that Maya begrudged the sale of any of it, but she had kept a few pieces that held special meaning for her.

She sat down on the side of her bed and opened a small sandalwood box on the bedside table next to the lamp, taking out the carved ivory ball that rested there. The filigreed ball was as big as her fist, and there was no piece of the lacework ivory that was wider than a quarter of an inch. Inside this ball was another, and another, and another. Twelve in all, they all moved freely inside one another. Maya turned it over and over in her hands, caressing the smooth ivory gently, remembering how her mother would hold the ball in front of her wondering eyes at bedtime, and tell her absurd tales about how it had been made-that ants had carved it, whittling it away from the inside out, or that a man had been shrunk to the size of a beetle so that he could create it.

Her finger traced the arabesque of ivory, the tenderly curling vines, the tiny trumpet flowers, as each turn of the ball revealed another glimpse of more tendrils, more buds inside. The balls ticked quietly against each other as she turned the sphere over and over in her hands, not thinking, just remembering.