The Serpent's Shadow

'I do,' she replied, from between clenched teeth. And in a few terse sentences she related what had happened off the operating table.

Amelia's face went red, then white, and her own fists clenched. 'So Simon Parkening, who failed every course he read for at Oxford, is now to be allowed to dictate what a competent physician and surgeon should do?' she hissed. 'What next? Is he going to get his uncle to rescind your license to practice?'

'He can't do that,' Maya began, but Amelia interrupted her, shaking her head.

'He can, and you have no recourse! Don't you know that if they wish to, these men can have laws passed to take away our very right to practice at all?' Her eyes were stormy, and her jaw set stubbornly.

Unfortunately, Maya knew very well that they could—which was one very good reason why she would not lodge a complaint against Parkening's behavior with his uncle. Her anger made her stomach roil.

'Listen,' Amelia continued, seizing her hands again. 'I also came to ask you if you would march in the suffrage parade today. Oh, I know you've always said no before, but don't you see why we need people like you, who are doctors and educated, to stand with us? Do you know why we're marching?'

'No—' Maya's anger ebbed a little, deflected momentarily by the quick change of subject.

Now it was Amelia's turn to look grim. 'You know that some of us have been thrown in prison for our actions; you probably know that, following Mrs. Pankhurst's example, many of them have gone on hunger strikes. What you don't know is that they've started to force-feed the ones on strike. Today one of the girls being force-fed died.'

'What?' She'd seen a lunatic being force-fed once; it had made her sick. To pry a person's mouth open with a metal instrument even at the cost of breaking teeth, to gag him so that he could not close his mouth again, to then feed a tube through the mouth or nose into the stomach and pour 'nourishing liquid' down it from a funnel seemed more like a barbaric torture that should have vanished with the Mongols. To inflict that on a lunatic was bad enough, for this might be someone who was not able to recognize the difference between eating and not eating—but to do so on a sane, sober woman who was going on a hunger strike to prove the justice of her cause? And then to do so in such a way as to kill her? That was like inflicting a death-sentence on someone who had stolen a crust of bread!

'How? How did she die?' was all she could think to ask.

Amelia bit her lip. 'They're claiming that it was an accident, that she choked later when she vomited,' the young woman said grimly, 'But one of the matrons admitted that she died while they were still pouring their foul mess into her. They probably put the tube into the lung instead of the stomach, the beasts! She was only a poor little Irish scullery maid, not a lady, not someone who would be missed. There are thousands like her, after all; she doesn't matter. Tomorrow her mistress can hire another just like her, from the hordes that live in the slums. They breed like flies, don't they?'

The words stung, just as Amelia had intended, and Maya shot to her feet. 'When is the march?' she demanded. 'And where?'

Maya had not expected to find herself at the front of the march, right behind the girls carrying banners— and the six who were carrying a vivid reminder of why they were all marching. Amelia had told her to wear her stethoscope about her neck and carry her Gladstone bag, the two items by which she would be identified as a doctor. 'We have to show people that we are just as able to provide intelligent, professional workers as men do!' Amelia told her fiercely.

The only addition to her black suit was a white sash, reading 'Votes for Women' that fitted from shoulder to hip. Her garb was peculiarly appropriate. She was in mourning for her father, but anyone looking at her wouldn't know that. It would appear that, like many of the women in this march, she was in mourning for the girl who had been murdered.

The force-feedings had not been discontinued after the death of one victim. As Amelia had bitterly pointed out, the authorities, assuming that the girl wasn't important enough to be noticed, had blithely continued in their brutality. But they were wrong.

The central banner, held aloft by two girls and hastily, but expertly, rendered by a suffragette who was an artist, depicted force-feeding in all its brutality; the victim tied down to a chair, four burly attendants restraining her, while a fifth, all but kneeling on her chest, poured something into the tube shoved down her throat. Behind the banner, six more girls carried a symbolic white coffin, draped with banners that read, 'Mary O'Leary, Murdered By Police!'

The bulk of the marchers walked behind them. Unlike other marches that Maya had seen, this one was not characterized by chants of 'Votes for Women!' and a brass band, but by silence broken only by the steady beating of muffled drums. Not a few faces bore the telltale signs of weeping—red eyes, or actual tears of mourning on pale cheeks—but there were no open sobs even though several of the younger women looked as if they might burst into tears on a slight provocation.

The silence was only on the part of the marchers, however. These marches were rarely accompanied by cheering, but in the silence, the shouting and jeering of the (predominantly male) onlookers was all the more shocking. Most of the hecklers were clearly of the laboring class, but by no means all of them, and Maya reflected that if the march had taken place on a Sunday or later in the day, there would have been many middle-class men adding their threats to those of the laborers. And there were threats, everything from declarations that the women should be taken home and locked up, to crude