The Serpent's Shadow (11 page)

He was not entirely certain that he was going to come out. At least, not in the same state—mental or physical, he was not sure—in which he had gone in.

5

P
ETER sat—carefully—on the single chair facing the doctor's desk, in a room that appeared to serve as study, initial consultation room, and office. The doctor studied him, her expression as serene as a bronze Buddha, and just as unreadable. He decided to show a bit more spine than he had for the past few moments, and studied her as well. Neither of them broke the silence; only the usual street sounds filtered in through the glass of the window facing the street—footsteps, hoofbeats, voices, and the occasional cough and chatter of a motorcar.

One day all our hansoms are going to be replaced by those wretched autos,
Peter reflected, as a particularly noisy vehicle chugged by, drowning every other noise as it did.
And on that day—perhaps I'll move to the Isle of Man, or of Wight, or the Scillys—or some place equally remote. God, how I hate those things!

As he continued to gaze unabashedly at the doctor's face, taking in the nuances of her features, he became more and more certain that his first guess about her parentage was correct.

Eurasian, no doubt.
With the surname “Witherspoon” there wasn't much doubt which parent was the English one; the only question was—how on
earth
had this woman, of mixed blood, managed to become a doctor? The task was difficult enough for an English girl! Who had sponsored her and given her the necessary education? The London School of Medicine for Women?

No, that surely wasn't possible; she looked too young. She must have begun her studies in her teens, and the London School wouldn't take a girl that young.

The office revealed very little of the doctor's personality, other than the fact that she—or her servants—were fanatically neat. Bookcases lined the wall behind her except for a space where a door broke the expanse, bookcases polished until they gleamed and filled with leather-bound volumes. Her desk, spartan and plain, held only pen, pencil, paper in a neat stack, an inkpot, and a blotter. There was one small framed print on the wall behind him, but he didn't dare turn around to look at it, not with those black eyes fixed on him. Printed wallpaper might be Morris; he wasn't sure; it was warm brown, yellow, and cream, exactly the colors he'd expect from an Earth Mage.

Nothing on the desk to help—no pictures, no trinkets. And nothing with writing on it.
So she was the kind who put her patients' records out of sight before they even left the office. A careful woman; a
wise
woman, given what she'd implied about her last client.

Ah, but what he sensed, now that he was
within
the enclosure of her protective magics, made him long for fifteen minutes left alone in this—or, indeed, any—room in the house. It wasn't just the force of her personality that left him a little stunned, it was the strength of her magic. Strangest of all was that
she wasn't using it.
She was certainly old enough to have learned as much as he about the arcane; certainly powerful enough—but the magic she had invested in the walls was held together mostly by the main strength of that power. If those spells had been put in place by an Elemental Apprentice, they'd have fallen apart before the mage turned around. She had taken a bit of this, a bit of that, and a heavy dose of willpower to create protections that were effective in their way, but with all the grace of a pig in a parlor, and all the symmetry of that poor bloke they called “The Elephant Man.” This was patched-together, mismatched, unaesthetic,
ugly
magic, and not the elegant creation she should have been able to weave. This, he would bet his soul, was not a clumsy, inelegant, or inept woman. This was not by her choice; she'd done what she could with instruments flawed and warped.

But there was one little bit of nice work there—tangled in among the rest, like a shining silk thread running through a skein of ill-spun yarn, was a whisper of magery Peter would dearly love to learn to cast himself.

Turn your eyes aside,
it whispered to those beyond the walls who looked with the inward eye and not the outward.
There is nothing here to interest you, there never was, and never will be. Seek elsewhere for your quarry; it is not here.

Peter couldn't fathom it, and didn't know where to begin a conversation with this woman. As it happened, he didn't have to.

“Well, I would judge, Mr. Scott, that no one sent you here from one of the many well-intentioned religious organizations who are trying to ‘save' young ladies like Sally without any plans for providing her with an alternate source of income,” the doctor said at last, leaning forward slightly and resting her weight on the arms laid across the top of her desk.

Peter didn't bother to ask her how she knew that; anyone with
her
potential would have intuition so accurate she might just as well be able to read minds.

Besides, it didn't take Conan Doyle's fictional detective to read a man's personality from his outward appearance.

“My leg is dodgy,” he offered, in hesitant truce. “Just not as bad as I made it out to be. Nobody's been able to do anything for it.”

Now she leaned back, a slight frown crossing her face. “I wouldn't think they would be able to,” she replied. “But you, sir, are
not
my usual sort of patient, and you would not have heard of me or my office from any of my usual clients. I would like to know why you appeared on
my
doorstep today.”

Peter wasn't a Water Master for nothing—and now that he was
inside
the lady's boundaries, her unseen friends in her fountain had no qualms about tossing him just the bit of information he needed.

“Fleet Clinic,” he said shortly—and knowing that his appearance, a bit down-at-heel though it was, put him a great deal more than a touch above those who stumbled into charity clinics, he added, “Used to be a ship's captain on the India route. I ran into one of my old lads looking better than he had in ten years, and the old boy told me about how you fixed him up. Thought I'd look you up and see if you had any notions about the knee.” Now he shrugged. “Reckoned it couldn't hurt to see, eh? Worst you can do is tell me what every other sawbones has.”

As he'd hoped, the charity clinic where she worked was probably so overwhelmed with poor working men and women that she'd have seen dozens of sailors among her patients since she set up practice, and wouldn't remember any particular one. She lost her frown, and her expression became one of skepticism rather than suspicion.

“And you have no objection to being treated by a woman?” she asked.

He gave a short bark of a laugh. “I've got no objection to being treated by a Zulu witch doctor if he could do something with this knee,” he retorted, with honesty that finally won her over. He was pleased to see a faint smile cross her lips, and the intelligent amusement he'd sensed lurking beneath her stern surface showing in her eyes.

“In that case,
Captain Scott,”
she said, plucking her pen from the inkwell and holding it poised over the paper, “why don't we begin at the beginning? Just what happened to that knee to make it turn against you, and when?”

Maya used her note taking to conceal some observation of her possible patient of a very different sort—for there was something of Power about him, and that had surprised her so much that for a brief time she had been unable to do more than stare at him.

Another woman might have found him unremarkable in any way whatsoever. He certainly wasn't handsome, not by any stretch of the imagination. His dress was neat and clean, but no finer than that of any other man in her working-class neighborhood. Sailors
always
ended up with a commonality of features, given the beating their faces usually took from the elements, and Peter Scott was no different there. His face could easily have been sculpted from ancient, withered leather, and though the chin was firm and the brow was high, his mouth set in lines that suggested more smiles than frowns, there was little in the ruin of it to show if he had been handsome in his youth, or otherwise. Only a pair of remarkable green eyes, an emerald color with a hint of blue, peering at her from among a nest of wrinkles caused by much squinting against the sun and storm, served as any sort of distinguishing feature. He'd had the good manners to remove his cap, which he held easily in hands that were relaxed—but why did they remind her of the paws of an equally relaxed and well-fed tiger? His hair, some color between yellow and brown, had begun to sport a streak of gray here and there. Not a young man—but not an old one either.

Then there was the scent of magic....

Magic! Here, in
London!
She would have been
less
shocked, had she hailed a cab only to find a camel and not a horse between the shafts.

What
was he doing here? If he was a mage, surely he could do as much for his own ailments as she!

Is he looking
—
for me?
That thought made her hand shake for a moment, so that she inadvertently blotted her notes. She exclaimed over her “clumsiness” and took the opportunity offered in repairing the damage to swiftly check her defenses.

They were intact. And although this man brought to mind the well-fed and sleepy-eyed panther—
yes; panther, and not a tiger
—she did not think she was in any danger. Not directly, at least, and not at this moment.

“Stand and walk for me,” she ordered, both to study his movement, and give herself time to think. “How much pain does this afflict you with?”

“What a reasonable man would expect—not that my friends would ever accuse me of being reasonable,” he replied, with a quick lift of his brow, inviting her to share the joke, and another glint of sapphire in the green of his eyes when he turned to look at her. “When the weather's fine, I get along all right; when it's foul, so's the knee and my temper both. And when it storms—”

For a moment, the briefest of moments, Maya saw the panther extend his claws and show a gleam of white teeth.

“—when it storms, then God help the man that crosses me.”

Then the panther pulled in his talons, hid his fangs, and became the sleepy cat again. Peter Scott smiled, shrugged, and invited her to share his little “joke.”

“Please, take a seat again,” Maya gestured. “I wouldn't care to be the one to put you or your knee to the test of that.”

She tapped the feathered end of her quill against her cheek as she considered him. Dared she take him as a patient? Prudence shouted “No!” This man could be—
was
—dangerous. He'd shown that side, however briefly, and she had no doubt that he had done so deliberately, calculatedly.
He had Power.

And it was that power that made him so tempting, so very, very tempting.

“You must learn the magics of your father's blood,”
Surya had said, so many times, when Maya had begged for the least, the littlest hint of instruction.
“It is that which flows through you, and not the magics of mine.”
And now, here was a mage of her father's blood....

A trap? Or a gift? How was she to tell the difference?

She had not asked for a sign, but one arrived on its own two feet to give her the answer she needed.

No part of the house was forbidden to Charan, although he seldom ventured anywhere but the conservatory, her bedroom and, occasionally, the kitchen. Yet, with no warning, no prompting, no hint whatsoever, the door—which must have been improperly closed, creaked slowly open. And there, clinging to it with his tiny hands, his great, solemn eyes fixed on the stranger, was Charan himself.

“By Jove!” Scott exclaimed, with as much pleasure as surprise. “A Hanuman langur!”

He was still seated, but leaned down so that he no longer loomed over Charan's head, and extended a hand. “Hello there, my fine fellow!” he said, in a coaxing tone that had none of the overly hearty tones of someone who is feigning interest in an animal or child. “I don't suppose you speak English, do you? My Hindu's a bit rusty. Would you care to come and make my acquaintance?”

Charan tilted his head to the side, then let go of the door and dropped to all fours, making his leisurely way to the stranger while Maya watched in mingled trepidation and astonishment. It
looked
as if Charan liked the newcomer—but Charan could be as duplicitous as any street brat, and was equally capable of pretending to like someone just so that he could get near enough to sink his fine set of fangs into the extended hand.