The Serpent's Shadow

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—'