The Serpent's Shadow

Triumph! At last she had the damned thing! And it hadn't burst, though its inflamed, swollen condition warned that it could, at any moment. She secured it with her left hand and held out her right.

'Clamp,' she muttered; for a miracle, her dresser heard her, and the clamp slapped into her outstretched hand.

Within moments, the offending organ resided in the tray of sawdust at the foot of the table, and she was in the process of suturing the incision shut while O'Reilly madly sprayed the last of the carbolic over hands, incision, and anything else that happened to fall in his path.

Done! She stepped back from the table; her dressers swabbed up the last of the blood with sponges, and covered the incision with clean sticking plaster. A wave of exhaustion threatened; she drove it back and turned to gaze up at the theater full of now-silent onlookers.

She was still so angry that her vision was blurred. She couldn't make out faces—but she sensed Simon Parkening to her left, and deliberately focused her attention slightly to the right, away from him, as if he was of no consequence to her.

'I direct the attention of you gentlemen to the plaques upon the wall, behind me there,' she said, in a voice that dripped ice and scorn. 'I assume, that since you who are medical students are all learned gentlemen, your Latin and Greek will extend to reading and understanding them. And in case your eyesight is faulty, I will tell you that the first reads, Miseratione non Mercede while the second is the Oath of Hippocrates. I suggest that you might benefit by taking them both to heart.' She paused, while utter silence fell over the group. 'And for those of you who were not capable of conning your Latin and Greek at University, I will translate the first, which means, From compassion, not for gain. I would take that to remind us that even those who cannot pay are to be treated here as equal to those whose deaths would make a stir in the world. As for the second—' Her gaze swept the room, blindly. 'I think you will find an injunction both to do no harm and to respect the wishes of the patient. For the rest, I suggest you apply to someone who has made the effort to learn the language of our legendary forefather.'

That said, she nodded to the dressers, who transferred the still-unconscious girl to the wheeled stretcher, and walked to the basin to wash her bloody hands and arms.

There's a couple in your eye, Parkening—and you can't claim I singled you out either.

There was not a single sound except for retreating footsteps echoing hollowly on the risers, as she washed, rinsed, and dried her hands, then took off the apron and dropped it on the floor to be collected and washed. Nor did she again turn to look at the retreating students. Her anger sustained and kept her head erect and her spine straight as she walked into the antechamber and shut the door.

Her patient was already gone, taken back to the ward. Hopefully, she would not start an infection. Hopefully, she would not have a miscarriage. Hopefully, the incision would be healed by the time she went into labor.

Hope, essentially, was all she had—but Maya had at least bought her that hope.

She sat down on the chair in the antechamber, drained, as one of the scrubwomen came in to fetch the soiled linen, take away the blood-soaked sawdust tray, and scrub down the table and floor—hopefully (there it was again!), in that order, and not the reverse. The old woman left the door open; there was no other sound now but her, shuffling about, picking up what had been dropped, cleaning, blithely ignoring the fact that it was human blood that soaked everything. Then again, the old woman probably cleaned this chamber many times a day, and had for years. By now, she probably never even noticed. Maya pulled off the band of toweling around her head, braced her elbows on her knees, and buried her face in her hands—not in despair, but in a white-hot rage.

Damn him! Damn him! Why and how had Simon Parkening got in? The last she heard, his uncle had banished him from the hospital! Maybe the heckling had been originally intended for Doctor O'Reilly, but most of it had been aimed at her.

I’ll lodge a complaint with Doctor Clayton-Smythe! That was her initial thought, but what good would that do? As angry as she was, she still knew that she was only here on sufferance, and if she complained about something that Clayton-Smythe would regard as trivial—which he would, since a certain amount of criticism and heckling was expected of students to a very junior surgeon— that sufferance might well end. Especially since the target of her complaints was his nephew, who was evidently back in his uncle's good graces.

Yes, she had successfully completed a difficult and delicate operation. But it was not one which would have met with the Director's full approval; Clayton-Smythe would have been in agreement with those who would have wielded the scalpel ruthlessly and with a callous lack of compassion for the girl's own wishes.

Maya's rage built yet again, and her hands clenched on the band of toweling she held against her forehead, when the outer door swung open, and another pair of hands seized her wrists.

She looked up into Amelia's face; her friend dropped her wrists and stepped back a pace involuntarily.

'I just saw O'Reilly, and I came here at once to congratulate you. . . .' She faltered. 'Good heavens, Maya, you look as if you wish to kill something!'