The Serpent's Shadow (14 page)

Which was just as well, all things considered. Too many times, pre-Larkin, Maya had been forced to defend herself with her umbrella and Amelia with a string “miser's purse” that contained, not money, but a lump of lead. It wasn't so much the inhabitants of the neighborhood that were the problem, it was the “visitors,” men drunk and looking for a whore, any whore, and knowing that the women of
these
streets could be had for less than a shilling. They tended to assume that any woman out on the street after dark was a whore, and that the only difference between a woman who rebuffed their offer and one who took it was the small matter of price.

“Mis‘rble day, eh, Miz Maya?” The salute came from the pavement at her feet as she strode past, and she grinned down at the filthy face looking up at her.

“It would be less miserable if you hadn't a hangover, Bob,” she replied, stepping over his sprawling legs, then making a skip to the side to avoid a puddle of liquid best left unidentified.

He only laughed. He was a day laborer, when he could find work, and when he couldn‘t, he drank up every cent he made or could borrow. He had no family, claimed he didn't want one, and as Maya knew only too well, was dying of tuberculosis. There was no cure for him, and he knew it, and so did she. Not even her healing talents could save him; she could prolong his life, but he didn't want her to. He had once, in a bout of drunken confession, told her that he hoped one day that his bottle of “blue ruin” would be out of a bad lot that would poison him and kill him quicker. That he wouldn't take his own life but courted an “accident” on a daily basis was a contradiction she never tried to resolve. Instead, on the rare occasions she could coax him into the Fleet, she did what she could to ease his pain and his breathing—and no more. It was her duty to fight death—but not when her patient pursued it, and had good reason to welcome its all-enfolding wings.

She dodged peddlers and pickpockets, pimps and prostitutes, human refuse and the refuse humans left behind, and was mostly greeted with the same ironic cheer that Bob had used with her. She was respected here, and if not beloved, was certainly welcome. She, unlike other charity doctors, made no demands that her patients “act like good Christians” or be one of the “worthy poor”—whatever that was supposed to mean. She dispensed medicine, sound advice, compassion, and some well-earned tongue-lashings in equal measure, and the people who came to her for help understood and respected that.

But as she neared the entrance to the clinic, shouts and shrieks of pain sent her from a brisk walk into a run; she picked up her skirts in both hands, the better to lengthen her stride, exposing ankles and even calves to the applause of a couple of drunken louts she didn't recognize. One was cuffed over the side of his head by a fellow with a barrowload of potatoes for sale as she sprinted past.

“Shoaw sum r‘spect, ye buggerin' swine!” said the peddler as another shriek sent her into a full-out run. “That there's a doctor, not 'un‘a yer tuppeny whoors!” Yes, it was going to be a busy day at the Fleet. Perhaps she should not have asked Ganesh to remove unspecified obstacles, since it seemed that he had removed the ones between new patients and her!

Tom brought her home just after ten that night, limp as a rag, yet strangely elated. How could she not be elated? She had saved the hand of a man who would otherwise have lost it, she had delivered three healthy babies in rapid succession, one presented breech that she had somehow managed to turn in the womb before labor was too far along, and one set of twins. All the patients recovering in her ward were doing well. Although the work had come in the door steadily from the moment she arrived to when they closed their doors, for once nothing had gone horribly, or even mildly, wrong. It had been a day full of small triumphs, not disasters.

Tom descended from his perch up on the driver's box and handed her out with a sober propriety that would have had anyone who knew him and his usual truculent manner with a fare gaping in astonishment. “You look done in, Miss Maya,” he said, as she smiled at him, grateful for the support of his hand tonight. “You go get some rest.”

“I will, Tom, I promise,” she said.
But not just now....
There were too many things to do first, not the least of which was to check to see if there were any messages or letters for her. Her
other
clients, the ladies who paid her so very well, tended to make appointments for a given afternoon on the evening before. Unless, of course, there was an emergency, in which case she would find a frantic message waiting for her, or even a messenger waiting to guide her to the emergency.

There were no messages, but there was a letter, waiting on the tray beside the door. She frowned at it for a moment, not recognizing the handwriting. As she was about to open it, Gupta appeared at the end of the hall. He had such an odd expression on his face that she put the letter back down on the tray. It could wait.

“Gupta, is there something wrong?” she asked, hurrying toward him, her weariness forgotten.

“No, mem sahib—” He hesitated. “But I have great need to speak with you. There are things I must tell you; things it is time that you should hear.” None of this made any sense to her. “Gupta, it is very late, and I am very tired—” she began.

But Gupta shook his head stubbornly. “I have seen a thing, and heard a thing, and there is much I must tell you. And tomorrow may be too late.”

That, coupled with his expression, made her shake off her tiredness with an effort. “Then take me where you will, and I will listen,” she replied.

She wasn't particularly surprised when he took her to the conservatory. Incense burned before the statue of Ganesh, and there were many candles burning among the plants. She settled into her usual chair; he sat cross-legged on the floor. She felt a little uncomfortable, looming above his head on her ersatz throne, but there was no way she could join him on a floor cushion, not in her confining Western clothing and corsets.

She waited for him to speak in his own time. There was no point in trying to hurry him, for he would not be hurried. He didn't force her to wait very long, however, just long enough for him to gather his thoughts and begin, as a storyteller would.

“There were, on a time, two sisters,” he said gravely. “Both were beautiful, both were gifted with more than the common measure of the power to speak and act with the Unseen. The younger, who wept not at all at her birth and had eyes that hinted of hidden things, was named Shivani. The elder, who laughed at her birth and had dancing sparks of happiness in her eyes, they called Surya, the Fire.”

“My mother?” Maya asked, with a feeling that something solid had dropped from beneath her, leaving her dangling in midair. She clutched the arms of her chair and breathed in the incense, a tightness in her chest. “My mother has a sister? But what happened to her?”

Gupta nodded. “As sisters should, they loved one another, despite such different natures. Your mother chose to study the powers of the day, her sister studied those of the night, as all expected, and still, despite that they now saw so little of one another, they were as sisters should be. But as time passed, Shivani withdrew into herself, kept her own counsel, and went ever more often to a certain temple and sect of the goddess Kali. At length, she treated Surya as she would a stranger, and your mother gathered about her these seven friends, to ease her loneliness.”

Here Gupta waved his hand around the conservatory, where all seven of Maya's pets, some warring against their own need for slumber, sat watching her, wide-eyed.

“Still, there was no thought of enmity between them—until your mother met Sahib Witherspoon, your father.” Gupta shook his gray head, with an ironic smile. “He had come to the temple where she served—came humbly, and not as the arrogant sahib of the all-wise English—to ask of the ways of our healing. He would learn, so he said. And he
did
learn; I was there, and I saw it all. He learned—and so did your mother. She taught healing, and she learned to love.”

“So did he,” Maya whispered softly, knowing how very much her father had loved her mother.

Gupta's nostrils flared. “Did I say he did not?” he demanded with annoyance. “But he was not my concern. She was my concern; I was her appointed guardian. I cared not what some English sahib felt or thought or did or did not do—not then—not then—”

He sighed deeply. “I was more than appointed guardian; I was your mother's friend. Never did she treat me as a servant, often did she confide to me her inmost thoughts. So she told me of her love, and of his. Then I feared for her, tried to dissuade her. Yet she would not be moved, and implored my help in convincing her father to allow a marriage.” He shook his head. “Impossible, of course. There were hard words, then threats, then Surya was locked away. And it was my hand, my hand, that set her free, to fly to your father and make the marriage of his people.” He smiled with great irony. “She did not go dowerless; she took what was hers by right, the gems and jewelry that formed her marriage portion, her seven friends, and her power. But it was for none of these that Sahib Witherspoon welcomed her into his arms and heart—I had seen that he would have her were she the lowest Untouchable. I, too, loved Surya as a daughter and a friend, and that was why it was my hand that turned the key in the lock that night.”

Although much of this was new information, it was nothing she hadn't already guessed, and Gupta had yet to reveal what he had seen that led to this confession. “So her family cast her off,” Maya prompted.

“As you know. What you do not know is that Shivani, her sister, was wild with anger. That Shivani, her sister, withdrew from her family into the heart of that temple of Kali. And that Shivani, her sister, vowed that neither the blood she shared with Surya, nor the power that Surya possessed, would remain in the barbarian hands of an unclean English sahib.”

The way that he said this, the tone of his voice, made Maya's blood run cold. “What did she do?” Maya whispered, not certain she wished to know.

“First, she sent a man who had been as trusted by Surya as I in her father's household. She sent him with death in his heart and a blade in his hand.” Gupta's eyes flashed in the darkness of his face, and he sat a little taller. “It was I who caught him in the garden, warned of his presence and his intention by Charan. It was I who spoke to him there in the shadows, as warrior to warrior and man to man, beneath the shelter of the drooping jasmine.”

Maya closed her eyes for a moment; it was so easy to picture what had happened, there in her father's garden that near-fatal night. She knew the jasmine that Gupta spoke of; she pictured a shadowy figure concealed by the fragrant boughs, and Gupta (younger, of course) whispering urgently to the half-seen assassin, with Charan in the tree above; chittering angrily to himself.

“I spoke of the anger of the English should he slay the wife of an officer; of the good heart of Sahib Witherspoon, who healed all who came to him. I then spoke words that were less honest; of the fickle nature of women, the jealousy of a sister who had
not
won for herself a husband of any sort, of the foolishness of the female nature.” Gupta shrugged as she raised an eyebrow at him. “I used the weapons that came into my hand, and I did not scruple that some were base. I fought for my lady's life that night, and I would have said any thing that won the day.”

“And it is better to fight with words than knives,” Maya replied. “You are wise as well as warrior, my friend. In a battle of words and wits, you would ever carry the day.”

Gupta blushed. “I would not say I was wise, only cunning, perhaps, and perhaps the gods gave me the words to move my friend-foe's heart. So it was I convinced him to lie to Shivani, to bring her the heart of a doe, and not the heart of our gentle dove, your mother. This he did, then fled and took his service far into the north, lest she discover his deception.”

“But how could she not know—” Maya began. Gupta cast her a withering glance.

“You, who weave protections about us every night, ask this? Your mother spent herself and her power in weaving a canopy of deception about herself, about the sahib, and about you. Her sister knew nothing, immured as she was in her temple, never coming forth either by day or night, weaving magics of her own, and plots to destroy the sahibs and all who fattened themselves at the English table.”

Now Maya understood. The English who thought that they ruled India because India was not wise enough to rule herself were fools. There was enough resentment and anger at the arrogant foreigners to supply the fodder for a hundred outbreaks of rebellion a year, and it was surprising that there had actually been so few. So her mother's sister had allied herself with one of those factions ... and not just any faction either, but with the
thugee
cult of Kali Durga.