The Serpent's Shadow

'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 'card 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