The Serpent's Shadow

Chapter Three

THE birds looked down on Maya and her guest with curiosity—all but Rajah, the peacock, who gazed at her with hopes of a biscuit from her plate. The mongooses were curled up around Maya’s feet, hidden by the flounce of her skirt, and Charan sat primly in a third chair next to his mistress. This was the first time that anyone other than the “family” had been in the conservatory since the last of the workmen left, and all of the pets were intensely interested in the newcomer. Maya handed a cup of tea across the tiny table to Amelia, who looked around her with a lively expression of interest. She had expressed approval of the office, envy of the surgery, and proclaimed that words failed her when it came to the conservatory. Since Maya’s certification, Amelia had not only become more of a friend, Maya had gotten the distinct feeling that she was someone who could be trusted utterly. In fact, it seemed to her more and more often that Amelia was someone that Maya had known. Surya, of course, would have said with that certainty that she had, that Amelia and Maya had been sisters or bosom friends or even mother and daughter in some long-ago time. Maya wondered what Amelia’s reaction would be to that. She no longer thought Amelia would be confused; her friend’s mind was too broad, too quick to apprehend a new idea for her to be puzzled by the idea of reincarnation.

She’d probably just nod and accept it, even if she didn’t entirely understand what I meant by it.

“This is a little Eden, and I cannot get over how polite your pets are!” Amelia exclaimed, handing Charan a plain biscuit in answer to his pitiful face and outstretched hand. Charan took it, bobbed his head once, and ran across the pavement to one of his favorite perches and began nibbling it at the edge, turning it around and around in his clever hands to preserve its shape. “I can see why you wanted this place. I wouldn’t have thought I could find a spot so peaceful just off a busy street.”

It’s a good thing she doesn’t know anything about tropical plants, though, or she would never have believed my blithe explanation of how fast they grow.

“I know children that aren’t as well-behaved as your pets,” Amelia continued with a smile. “Perhaps you ought to set yourself up as a deportment teacher as well as a doctor!”

“I suppose you could thank my mother for that, not me. They were hers originally,” Maya told her, crumbling another biscuit for Rajah, who bowed his head graciously to accept the offering from her hand.

Amelia hesitated, then replied, cautiously, “You’ve never told me much about her. She must have been a remarkable woman…”

Maya had already decided that this tea party would be a good time to open up further to her friend and see what came of it. She was tired of having no one to talk to except her household, most of whom really didn’t understand half of what she told them. Granted, she wouldn’t be able to tell Amelia about her magic—but it would be good to have a close friend near her own age and with most of the same interests.

So Maya laughed a little. “Remarkable? That’s a rather pale word for my mother, considering that she defied her family, friends, and religion to marry my father, then continued to defy his people by being his very visible wife, rather than hiding away in his house and pretending she didn’t exist.”

“Oh, my—that must have put the fur up on the back of the old cats.” Amelia put her hand up to her mouth, not quite hiding a smile, her cheeks turning very pink, but not from embarrassment. Amelia took an unhallowed glee in “tweaking the tails of the old cats.” She was deeply involved in women’s suffrage, and any time there was a prank played that showed up the antisuffragists for the fools they were, it was certain that Amelia had a hand in it. “Good for her! I just hope they didn’t make her life a misery.”

“Oh, the ‘old cats’ rule Colonial society with an iron rod in India,” Maya sighed. “They managed to shut us out of the Club doings, the dances, and the rest of it. But love will break out, old cats notwithstanding, and there still aren’t that many English women in the Raj. There are a good many native wives now, and by no means are they all the wives of Private Tommys. Mother wasn’t alone, and neither was I; we had our own dances and club to go to and amusements—and our polo team beat theirs three times out of four.”

Though most of the other women donned corsets and bustles, and tried to be more English than the exiles, talking about a home they’d never seen and weren’t likely to, trying to pretend the world they left behind didn’t exist. They’d even adopt English names, for heaven’s sake!

“Ah,” Amelia nodded wisely. “The Eurasians. I’ve read some little about them; I think they must be very brave people, when it all comes down to it. It’s hard to defy society and manage to be happy at the same time. Are they all as handsome as you?”

Now it was Maya’s turn to cover her lips, her cheeks flushing hotly. “Good heavens, Amelia, what a thing to say!”

“Well, are they?” The first thing that had attracted Maya to her friend was her artless candor, and it seemed that Amelia was determined to exercise that trait to the fullest today. Amelia waved her hand vaguely as she elaborated her question. “I mean, I’ve always heard it said that children of—I mean—when you have parents of two different races—and the male students at Royal Free—”

Amelia fumbled to a halt, finally realizing that she might have overstepped herself, but Maya laughed, fanning her cheeks to cool them, and over her head the parrot echoed her laugh. “I suppose, but it hardly matters,” she said with great candor herself. “No gentleman who wishes to rise in the colonial ranks would ever marry a woman of mixed race, and as for the Eurasian men—well! They certainly need not apply to the mama of an English girl!”

Amelia flushed, but her eyes sparkled. “I’ve half a mind to go find out for myself, once I’ve been certified,” she said with her chin raised defiantly. “Since no proper gentleman would ever marry a female doctor either! I want to be a doctor and a wife and mother, and I rather doubt I’m going to find that possible here. Perhaps someone whose parents have already flouted custom would find himself better able to do the same.”

Maya sobered at once. “Your talent and training would be welcome in India,” she said earnestly. “Half the English doctors of the male persuasion are so ham-handed they kill more female patients than they save, even here; good Western medicine is a rare thing there. You would be a godsend.”

“And what about the gentlemen?” Amelia asked, dimpling.

Why, when she’s animated, her whole face just comes to life! She’ll never be pretty, but she’s not going to turn into a dull lump of dough, either, as she gets older.

“I’m not sure what to say,” Maya began hesitantly. “I can tell you that many quite eligible Eurasian gentlemen would pay you honorable court. For that matter, so would many eligible British officers and officials, though you might have to sift through quite a few toads to find the frog prince that will allow his wife to be herself.” She paused, tapping one finger on her cheek, thinking, as Amelia cast her eyes upward at that last phrase.

Amelia persisted. “Anxious mommas have been sending spinster daughters out to India for decades to look for husbands, haven’t they? And they do seem to find them there.” She sighed and regarded her cup of tea pensively. “Today, at the Fleet, Doctor Stevens said that I have a real gift for handling babies and children and asked if I would mind being put on that duty on a permanent basis. I said yes, of course, that I’d enjoy that; and that it’s a shame and a sin that no one has ever worked out medicine for children, that there’s no specialty in children’s medicine.”

“And Doctor Stevens said—?”

Amelia laughed. “You know she would agree with me! Especially after that row she got into with Browning, and him trying to claim children don’t feel pain! So we agreed, and it started me thinking that I’d like to have some of my own.” A wistful expression crept over Amelia’s face. “But—find a husband who’d accept that I’m a doctor with duties equal to his? Not in London. Not in all of England, I would think. Perhaps in Canada or America, but if I’m going to go abroad, I’d rather be among people who speak an English I can understand.”

Maya stirred her tea. “I really don’t know if you could find a suitor who would accept that you are a doctor as well as his wife. India makes some men more flexible in their views, but it makes others more rigid. And you might find yourself alternately appalled and enraged by the way that native women are treated, even by their own men.”

“I’m alternately appalled and enraged by the way British women are treated by their own men,” Amelia replied crisply. “Could I set up a private practice there? Is there enough need for one?”

“You’d have paying patients enough,” Maya admitted, and took a sip of tea. “The Army surgeons are for the most part completely unsuited to treating women, and the military wives and daughters would be glad enough for a lady to confide in. There are high-caste women who cannot see a male physician by law and custom, though their lords and husbands are enlightened enough to value Western medicine, and those would pay you well indeed.”

“Hmm. Pay we certainly don’t find here, do we? Well, all but you, that is, and there aren’t too many of us bold enough to take your course.” Amelia tilted her head to the side. “Speaking of which, how is your practice?”

“I believe I’m seeing every dancer, actress, and singer within walking distance of this office,” Maya told her, not troubling to conceal her amusement. “Not to mention that I’m starting to attend to the kept women and mistresses of—I presume—our lawyers, brokers, and merchants.” She said it without a blush. Amelia giggled, but her cheeks were red. “It probably won’t surprise you to know that I am introducing them all to the benefits of… hmm… limited births.”

“Good,” Amelia said with emphasis. “It will trickle down to their servants, and from there into the street. If I see one more woman at the Fleet with nothing more wrong with her than being worn to death with birth after birth—”

She snapped her mouth shut, but at Maya’s nod of agreement, relaxed. “You should know that I share your opinion, dear,” Maya said quietly. “Even though we’ve never discussed it before at length, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I make a point to educate my female patients at the Fleet—” She paused, and sighed. “The trouble is, of course, that begetting children costs nothing, but preventing them doesn’t.”

“Sadly true.” Amelia echoed her sigh, then took another scone, with an air of changing the subject. “So why did you leave India? I can tell that you are homesick, more often than not, and what you’ve told me about needing lady doctors there goes for you as much as for me. And look at what you’ve done here! It’s India in miniature, surely.”

Maya bent to add more tea and sugar to her cup, and gave Charan a second biscuit. “Not quite. The native ladies won’t see me, at least not the high-caste ones; I’m half-caste, and they are as prejudiced against my mixed blood as any bigot here.”

“And being treated by our Colonial ladies as something a little below the invisible fellow who swings the punkah-fan rather than as a doctor would not be to my taste either,” Amelia filled in, with a grimace of distaste, and Maya nodded, pleased at her quick understanding.

“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.”

“Garn—” the girl shook her head. “Th’ rest of ‘em said you ‘ad a way of puttin’ things. Me mam alms said the legs was the last thing t’ go. Dance th’ cancan, 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.

Much older. Those eyes have seen more than anyone should see in a lifetime.

“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.

Even though any man can walk into his club with a copy of The Lustful Turk or Fanny Hill under his arm and no one would so much as blink an eye, she thought resentfully. And he can show his Japanese pillow book or illustrated Kama Sutra to select friends over brandy and cigars and be congratulated on his acquisition and refined tastes. But Anna Besant’s The Law of Population and Dr. Allison’s Book for Married Women are obscene, and cannot be permitted.

Of course, as a lady, she wasn’t supposed to know about those erotic books the men so enjoyed at their liberty at all, much less the titles of them. She certainly wasn’t supposed to know about the two “bibles” of contraception. Nor are their wives and sisters, and oh, the storm in the parlor if they ever learned how many copies are locked up in dressing-table drawers!

“Here,” she said, handing the girl the pamphlets; the patient looked at it dubiously, since the title of the first one, concerning itself with population, didn’t seem to have anything to do with “not having babies.”

“This will refresh your memory after you’ve left the office,” Maya promised her. “There is so much information in these little books that no one could remember it all after one hearing. Now, this is basically what’s in those pages.”

She spent the next half hour giving the girl a detailed lecture on all of the varieties of conception prevention outlined in the famous “obscene” pamphlets, plus a couple more she herself knew about from India. At first, the girl seemed taken aback by her brutal frankness and uncompromising language, but she soon got over her shock. A time or two she shook her head as though objecting to what Maya told her—something Maya wasn’t particularly surprised at, since some of the means she had described were probably out of the girl’s hands or beyond her pocketbook. Unlikely that she would get the cooperation of her partner, for instance.

But when she finished, just as the clock struck ten, the girl looked satisfied, but still wary. “Wot’s the proice?” she asked bluntly.

“There’re two parts to the bargain. The first is to share what you’ve learned,” Maya replied, just as bluntly. “Share it with the other girls working the streets, whether they’re your friends or just the girlfriends of your man’s friends. Share it with any other woman that will listen to you, washerwomen, seamstresses, factory girls—anyone. That, or tell them they can learn the same things here or at the Fleet Street Clinic, either from me, or from a lady named Amelia Drew.”

“A’ roight,” the girl said. “Wot’s the rest?”

“Pass the word that this place isn’t to be robbed.” Maya smiled thinly at the girl’s start of surprise. “Don’t think for a moment that I didn’t know that was part of the reason you came here. Tell your friends that it’s no use. My father was in the Army; I have a pistol. He taught me how to shoot it as soon as I could hold it. I’ve killed a tiger and dozens of cobras. It would be no challenge to shoot a thief. What’s more, I’ll make a point to shoot out the legs of any intruder, then call the police to deal with them.”

The girl’s eyes kept widening. This was clearly not what she had expected.

“If I don’t happen to be here, I have two men-servants with me here who used to be Gurkhas, and they have no compunction about slitting English throats.” A lie on both counts, but one Indian looked like another to most Englishmen, and the Gurkhas had a fearsome reputation that reached even the illiterate and impoverished. Maya took a step nearer, towering over the girl. “In fact, I think they might enjoy it. Now, is that a fair bargain for what you’ve gotten tonight?”

She stuck out her hand. The girl looked at it dubiously, swallowed hard, then rubbed her own grubby palm over the equally grubby fabric of her dress and shook it solemnly. “Yes’m,” she said slowly. “Cor, but yer a ‘ard ‘un!”

“I had to be; I still have to be,” Maya replied, preferring that the girl use her own imagination to figure how Maya got to be so “hard.”

“Reckon there’s a chance Oi’ll get some kicks an’ curses from me man an’ his mates, but fair’s fair,” the girl continued, then shivered. “There’s stories about them Hindoo ‘eathen, an’ once they settle, ‘spect they’ll see it moi way. How’d ye know Oi was on the ket-chin’ lay?”

“Silk kerchief,” Maya said, and got a wince in return. “One more thing. This isn’t a charity clinic, and I don’t have to answer to anyone in a dog collar for what I do. I don’t ask if people are deserving before I treat them.”

The girl flashed her a conspiratorial look. “ ‘Appen some’un shows up on the step some noight?” she suggested coyly.

“Any woman, but only men who are sick, not drunk,” Maya said adamantly. “If they’re wounded, I’ll see them only if it’s something that won’t involve the police. If I lose my licenses, I can’t help anyone. It’s my clinic, and I can make the rules here.”

The girl took the words philosophically. “ ‘Appen we’re nearer the Fleet, anyroad, an’ they ain’t too curious there,” she replied, and stood up, the pamphlets vanishing somewhere inside her shawls. Maya noticed that her cough had vanished, too. It had probably been part of her habitual disguise, intended to garner sympathy while at the same time discouraging too close contact. “Thenkee,” she said, as Maya opened the outer door for her. “Oi’ll keep my side uv this.” Maya saw her out, then closed and locked the front door for the night, leaning her back against it as she exhaled a sigh. Well! From Amelia to a cutpurse, I’ve had quite an assortment tonight.

There might still be calls tonight, but those would be emergencies; at this point she was probably free for the evening. With an effort, she pushed her hands against the door and levered herself up. The garden would be the best place to settle her mind before she went on her nightly round before bed.

Charan might have been waiting for her to appear, and Sia and Singhe as well; they all ran to her, Charan springing up onto her shoulder and the mongooses winding around her ankles until she settled into her favorite chair. Sia and Singhe coiled around her feet, pinning her to the spot, while Charan dropped down off her shoulder into her lap, chittering up into her face.

“You don’t say?” she responded indulgently, as if she were having a conversation with the little monkey. “Well, I’m glad you approve of my handling of the situation.”

Charan shoved his head under her hand to be scratched. Obedient to his wishes, she obliged him. He was the most fastidious monkey she had ever seen; most of his tribe were filthy little wretches, but Charan was cleanly to a fault, bathing every day in the pool, and depositing his droppings in the same box of sand that the mongooses used. She had never seen so much as a single flea on any of them, which was nothing short of astonishing.

What were you to Mother? she wondered, not for the first time. You were more than mere pets, that much I know, but what? Charan looked up at her as if hearing her thoughts, and chittered softly.

She gathered him closely, like a child, and he nestled into her arms. Surya had had so many secrets, but surely she could have divulged this one.

Maya stared into the shadows, compulsively searching for a slim, slithering one, a shadow that slipped from shade to shade. Blood of your blood, Mother. Why couldn’t you have trusted me? I might have been able to protect Father, if only you had trusted me…

Two hot tears ran down her cheeks, and dropped into Charan’s fur.

But perhaps not. Maybe everyone was right, that her father had been so distraught by her mother’s death that he had been careless.

Maybe he wanted to die. That was something she hadn’t wanted to consider, but it was an inescapable thought. And an uncomfortable one—not just that he had wanted to die, but that he had not loved her, his own daughter, enough to live.

Bitter, bitter—too bitter to contemplate for long. And not like the brave, stubborn man she had known all her life.

And I—I am just as stubborn as both of them put together. He left the family to me, as she left her pets, and I swear I will protect them both.

And with that determined thought, she set her chin, disentangled herself from mongooses and monkey, and went on her nightly rounds to bolster those protections that, she hoped, would keep them all safe.