The Serpent's Shadow

The noise and merriment in the small room just off the kitchen dispelled her shivers. The entire family, including the children, sat on the floor on cushions and carpets in the area that would have held a table for the servants in a proper English household. Maya took her place among them, and helped herself from the pots and plate of flat bread resting on a footed tray in the center of the group.

Why waste two rooms on dining, when there was small chance that she would ever play hostess to a meal for anyone outside her household? The former dining room was now an invalid's room, a place for a seriously ill patient to stay until she was well enough to be discharged and taken to her own home. And this servants' meal room was good enough for Maya; brightly lit, painted the same cream color of the walls of her old, beloved bungalow, redolent with saffron and spice, it was another small slice of the place she thought of as home.

The children, who had all gotten training in English from the time they were able to toddle, attended a local day school, and she listened with amusement as they chattered about their lessons and classmates in a mix of Hindustani and English. Their parents and grandfather listened to the babble with a tolerance no English parent (believing the rule that 'children should be seen and not heard') would ever understand.

The four children made enough chatter for twice their number, but Maya enjoyed their artless confidences. Ravi, the eldest boy, was enough like his grandfather Gupta already that the elder man was in the habit of taking Ravi with him on his trips to the market and other harmless errands. Ravi was eleven; his brothers Amal and Jagan nine and five respectively, and their adorable, large-eyed sister Suli was seven and just beginning the schooling that Jagan had already started.

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