The Serpent's Shadow (7 page)

“It wasn't so bad when my parents were alive, but when I was alone, it got rather worse. My mother died in a cholera epidemic, despite all we could do for her, my father and I,” she said slowly.
Was there something more to that than just a virulent disease?
she wondered, as Amelia expressed her sympathies.
Father never considered that—but Father didn't believe in magic either
.
And when Mother wasn't there to protect us anymore
....

Surya had made enemies when she wedded a white man. There were as many Indians who felt she had committed the greatest and most heinous sin by marrying out of her race and caste as there were English who felt the same. More, actually—and at least one of them was a magician with powers equal to Surya's; a magician who wasn't averse to using those powers to take revenge on Surya, the man who had married her, and the daughter they had produced.

“My father didn't live long after she died,” Maya continued, tight-lipped. “He was bitten by a snake. In our own bungalow.”

Amelia's cup clattered in her saucer, and she hastily put it down on the tea trolley. Her eyes were wide, and she extended her hand to Maya in automatic sympathy. “Oh, Maya! Dear Lord-I cannot imagine—were you there? Was it a cobra?”

Maya shook her head. “He might have survived a cobra bite; this was a krait, a tiny little thing, no bigger than this.” She held her hands out, about a foot apart. “They are far, far deadlier than the largest cobra. It was in his boot; he was dead in minutes. Some people said that Mother's death had affected him so badly that he forgot to take ordinary precautions—”

But I'm sure, sure, that he would never have forgotten to shake out his boots. Never. And Sia and Singhe would never have missed a snake in the bungalow, unless
some magic
had been worked to
keep
them
from
scenting it
. Surya had tried to warn her daughter in her last hours, but by then she had been so delirious with fever that all she could manage was disjointed phrases. “Shivani,” was the only name that Maya had recognized; Surya had been terrified of “the serpent's shadow,” and that alone should have warned Maya to beware of snakes. But she had been prostrate with grief, and thinking not at all.

That had been no ordinary krait that killed her father, Maya was certain of it; that was when she had known she had to escape if she wanted to live. And despite her grief, her loss, she did want to live!

“Oh, Maya—I can see why you would want to leave. I am so sorry.” Amelia reached for Maya's hands, and Maya reached to take hers, taking comfort from the younger woman's sympathy, even though she could not possibly understand the greater part of what had driven Maya here. “You
have
friends here, you know, and we'll try to keep you from being too lonely.”

Maya held tightly to her friend's hands, glad beyond telling for the warmth of genuine friendship offered. “If you weren't my friend, Amelia, I would find this place desolate indeed,” she said warmly, and was rewarded by Amelia's smile. “Thank you.”

“Thank
you,
my dear,” Amelia replied, and chuckled. “In all candor, I'm afraid you're sometimes going to think that my friendship is purely selfish. If you had never come here, I would never have been invited to a little paradise like this, and be treated to enough warmth that I can close my eyes and think I'm in a midsummer garden. Sometimes I think that spring will never come!”

“And I feel the same,” Maya replied ruefully. “I cannot believe that spring is anything more than rain and leafless trees!”

“Oh, it's well worth the wait, thank goodness, or we English would go mad,” Amelia laughed. “If you can get away for a weekend, I'll take you into the country once spring is properly here, and you'll see. We'll even take the train to Oxford, hire bicycles, try our hands in a punt, and go scandalize the male dons! What do you think?”

“I'll look forward to
that
,” Maya said, meaning every word, and from there the discussion diverted to Amelia's fellow medical students at the London School of Medicine for Women, then to the teachers. Amelia had a knack for mimicry that was the equal to a monkey or a parrot, and she had Maya in stitches before too long.

When she left, Maya was sorry to see her go, but Amelia needed to get back to her lodgings before dark, and Maya kept early evening office hours, since most of the women of her practice were never awake before noon.

Tonight she saw three women. One was a music-hall dancer, suffering from the usual foot and knee complaints, and terrified that she would lose her job if she couldn't perform. She had come straight from the theater, hoping against hope to have a cure before the curtain came up. Her friends had clubbed their pennies together for a cab because she couldn't walk the distance. She looked completely out of place in her short, frilled, scarlet dancing dress with a froth of cheap petticoats, bodice covered in cheap spangles and tinsel, her hair done up on her head and crowned with three faded ostrich plumes that had seen better days.

“It's that Frenchy can-can, Miss Doctor,” the girl said, her face pasty beneath the makeup she wore, as Maya gently manipulated the swollen knee. Beneath the makeup she was also dowdy, to put it bluntly. Ordinary face, ordinary talent, but extraordinary legs. Her legs were what she'd been hired for; if they failed her—Maya didn't have to guess the rest. “It's thrown me knee out, it has, and me ankles hurt so—”

“I quite understand, dear,” Maya soothed. “Now, you're making your muscles all tense, and that's making it hard for me to help. Can you sit back and relax for me?” She looked up at the pale round of a face with two red patches on the cheeks, and the eyes hidden in smudges of charcoal. “I think I can fix this for you, if you'll just relax.”

“No knives, no operatin' then? You can fix it now?” There was hope there. “I saw a doctor at a clinic when it started gettin' sore, an' he said there oughta be an operation, so I left an' tried t' work it off.”

The other doctor was probably looking for a poor little fool to experiment on,
Maya thought bitterly. There were surgeons and doctors of that sort, perfectly willing to work at charity clinics just so they could find people who wouldn't complain if they were used to try out some new apparatus or theory.

“No, dear. Your knee just got a bit out of joint—not quite dislocated, but enough so you'd be in pain,” Maya replied. A lie, of course; the ligaments were torn, but she could fix that. “Then your poor ankles weren't quite up to taking on the extra load, you see. The more it hurt, the more you threw yourself off balance, and that just made things worse. Like trying to put out a fire by throwing paraffin oil on it.”

Satisfied with the explanation, the girl leaned back in the comfortable easy chair Maya had placed in the examination room, and Maya called on her magic.

This she could do, had been able to do from the time she could toddle, with no need of tutelage from Surya. Healing came as naturally to Maya as breathing. With her hands making slow, soothing massaging motions on the girl's knee, she reached down, down, deep into the native, living earth and rock beneath the pavements of the city, deep into the heart of her own little jungle, and up into the life force of the city itself. Where there was life, there was power, and that power could be channeled into healing. It poured generously into her, glowing emerald, sparkling topaz, golden brown and warm, bringing with it the taste of cinnamon and honey in the back of her mouth.

She gathered all of it into herself, the golds, yellows, and velvety browns of the earth-energy, the peridot and leaf-green and turquoise life-energy; she brought it in through her navel and transmuted it into the ever-verdant emerald green of healing, sending it out in a steady stream through her hands.

“Cor—that feels good, that does,” the girl murmured, in a note of surprise. “Feels warm!”

“That's because I'm getting the blood to flow properly around your knee,” Maya told her. “This is quite a new treatment—German, you know.”

“Oh,
German,”
the girl repeated, as if that explained everything. “Them Germans, they got all the tricks, don't they, then?”

Maya laughed, a low and rich chuckle. “So they think.” She continued to pour healing into the knee, mending the tears invisibly, without scarring, and leaving enough residual energy that the ligaments could continue to strengthen themselves. The girl was going to need strong knees if she was going to dance the can-can. She moved down to the ankle, which fortunately suffered only from strain; she pulled out inflammation and pain, leaving ease in her wake. Simple magic, simply done, but satisfying. When she stood up, the girl got up carefully out of the chair, and her eyes widened as she tested her knee and found it strong and supple again, then rose on her toes and did an experimental kick over Maya's head. Maya had been expecting this, and didn't duck.

“Blimey! It's better!” she blurted, and flushed with pleasure.

“And mind you don't skimp on your exercises from now on, nor on your warm-ups,” Maya replied, as the girl fumbled in her worn velvet reticule and pressed her five-shilling fee into Maya's hand. “That's what got you into this trouble, you said so yourself. Does a fiddler mistreat his fiddle? He keeps it warm and safe; he doesn't play it in the rain, nor ask too much of it until it's been limbered and ready. Those legs are your instrument, my girl. Treat them right, and they'll put bread in your mouth for a long, long time. Don't be tempted to show off your kicks until you've warmed up your muscles and stretched them out.”

“Gam—” the girl shook her head. “Th' rest of ‘em said you 'ad a way of puttin' things. Me mam allus said the legs was the last thing t' go. Dance th' can-can, an' they ain't lookin' none at yer face.”

“Exactly. In fact, I've heard that the greatest star of the can-can in Paris is a hideous old washerwoman with a face like a flatiron—but she has the best legs in all of France, and they throw money at her feet when she dances.” Maya held the door of the examining room open for her, and the dancer frisked out with a laugh.

“Thank‘ee, Miss Doctor!” the girl said gratefully, with a touch of the pertness that probably made her look prettier on stage than she really was. “If I walk at a good clip, I can make the theater in time for curtain
and
get me legs warmed up!”

“You're very welcome.” Maya looked at the benches in the hall as the girl skipped out the door. There was one patient waiting, a woman who seemed a little shabbier than her usual run, and was coughing. The brown dress had once been fine velvet, but now was so rubbed that there was scarcely anything left of the pile anywhere, and it didn't look to have been cleaned or brushed in months. The girl had a new silk kerchief around her neck, her hair put up inexpertly beneath a bonnet that was liberally trimmed with motheaten feathers and stained rosettes of ribbon. She looked to be a little younger than the dancer who had just left; sixteen or seventeen, but older than her years.

“Yes?” Maya said as the girl looked up, with a peculiar expression of mingled hope and fear of rejection on her face. “I take it that you are waiting to see me?”

“Oi carn't pay ye,” the girl said flatly.

“You can, but not necessarily in money,” Maya replied—and at the girl's look of alarm, she shook her head. “No, not like that, not what you're thinking. Come into the examining room and tell me what's wrong, and we'll see what we can do about it.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the girl rose. Just as slowly, she sidled into the office, then into the examination room when Maya directed her to go onward. She looked about her with the wariness of a cornered animal, and was only a little less alarmed when Maya motioned to her to take a seat on the chair rather than the table.

She's not a whore
—
or not just a whore. She's a pickpocket, I think,
Maya decided, sizing up her patient. She'd been expecting someone on the wrong side of the law to turn up sooner or later, but to have it be a female was beyond her hopes or expectations. This was going to present an excellent opportunity for a number of possibilities.

Maya remained standing. “The trouble is not your cough, I think,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and regarding the girl, who looked ready to bolt at any moment. “A good ruse to get past Gupta, but I believe you've come for another reason entirely.”

The thief's eyes widened with surprise, then she shook her head. “Oi ‘eard—ye know ways.”

“Ways?” Maya thought she knew what the girl meant, but intended to find out for certain.

“Ways—not t' ‘ave babies.” The girl shuffled her feet and looked at the tips of her worn, cracked boots, then looked up at Maya defiantly. “Oi 'eard from someun' at th' Odeon.”

Maya nodded. “I do. Some are more certain than others. Some will cost you money, not for me, but for what you need to prevent a baby. So, that's what you want, then? Can you read?”

Again the girl nodded, almost defiantly. “Oi kin read, but wot's that got t' do wi' it?”

“Because I'm going to give you one of each of these.” Maya went to the cupboard, and being careful to block what she was doing from the girl, opened a concealed panel and took out a pair of small, printed booklets from a stack of several like them. Possession of these booklets, which had been judged “obscene and pornographic” by men who should have been ashamed of themselves for making such a judgment, could have gotten her in a world of trouble. Distributing them, even more so.