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she would be able to see more than the very brightest of stars and
the moon. How she missed the skies of home, where the stars hung like
jeweled lamps in an ebony dome!
All the magic Maya knew had been learned by covertly spying on her
mother as the former priestess spun protections for her family, or
cobbled together from street magic gleaned from the few genuine
fakirs, then compounded from a mixture of instinct, guess, and trial
and error. She had woven a web of street-charm protections over this
house and its occupants; every night she strengthened them, going
over them three times to replace where the erosions of time and this
city weakened them.
Three times she walked through each room of the first floor, in the
dim light coming from the gaslights outside, or the light from the
hall, bolstering her charms. There was no sign that anything had put
those protections to the test, but would she be able to tell if
anything had just probed at them rather than trying to destroy them?
I don't know. . . .
With a determined shake of her head, she thrust away the doubt. This
was not the time to worry about her abilities; doubt made magic weak.
That much, at least, she knew.
Besides, now that she had completed her protections, the charms she
worked next were the ones she was sure of. Prosperity on the surgery
and office and the front door, health on the kitchen, peace on the
house itself. She smiled to herself as she heard the children above
in the nursery mute their quarrel over a game into an amiable
disagreement. Not that her charm stopped all quarrels; it was most
effective right after it was first cast, and like the protections, it
eroded a little with time and stress. But it did make life easier on
everyone living here, making everyone a little more inclined to
forgive and sweetening tempers.
Now her last, and easiest, work of the evening. She returned to the
conservatory and spent a little time on each and every plant,
strengthening it, encouraging it to grow at a rate much faster than
"normal," and giving it the extra energy to do so. Once the trees,
plants, and bushes were tall and strong enough to suit her, vigorous
enough to cover the walls and give her the complete illusion of a
tiny jungle, she would let them grow at their own pace. Until that
time, she would use her own strength to build her sanctuary, the
sanctuary she needed so desperately in this alien place.
It wearied her; it always did. When she was done, Nisha called her
softly. She hooted at the owl comfortingly and blew out the candle-
lamps as she left, so that the conservatory descended into the sweet,
warm darkness her pets all loved.
She closed herself in her office to study, with the murmur of voices
within the house and the sounds of wheels on cobblestones outside as
a soothing counterpart to her reading. Her father had never scrimped
on medical texts and journals, and neither would she. There was so
much to learn! It seemed that not a week passed but that some new
medical discovery was heralded. Some were nonsense, of course; she
had an advantage over her colleagues in that she could tell if a
treatment for an illness or injury was actually doing any good. X-ray
photography was a boon, if one could keep the patient still enough-
but electrical stimulation was stuff and nonsense. She could tell
easily enough with her own special senses that the patient got no
more benefit from it than from any other nostrum in which he truly
believed. Belief was a powerful medicine, ofttimes more powerful than
any pill or potion she could offer.
As for sanitary surgery, she already felt that simply boiling
instruments before surgery was nowhere near enough. Although she had
had no say in the matter when she operated or assisted under the
supervision of one of Royal Free's senior surgeons, from now on she
would have a nurse spritzing the patient and the hands of those
operating on him with dilute carbolic acid during her surgeries. Dr.
Lister was right, and he would save many, many lives with his ideas,
if he could get other physicians to implement them.
Tonight she studied gas gangrene. It was not the sort of literature
that anyone but a small percentage of people on this island would
even consider for after-dinner reading, and only a minuscule number
of those would think it suitable under any conditions for a woman.
Maya didn't care; she wanted to see if there was any hint in the
current papers that her carbolic-acid atomizer would prevent the
spread of this fearful condition. By the time she finished for the
evening, with the clock on the mantle over the unused fire striking
eleven, she had come to the conclusion that it would help, but no
more. If only there were thin, flexible gloves available, impermeable
to those tiny creatures Louis Pasteur had discovered as the root
cause of infection and disease! Then a surgeon could operate without
fear that the dread bacteria would enter some tiny nick or cut on her
hands!
But India rubber was too thick and became sticky when warm, lambskin
and eelskin little better than bare hands, for they required seams
and, once used, could not be used again. Washing, with soap and
carbolic, before and after, thoroughly and exhaustively: that was the
only preventative, and that a shallow one. But she could not let fear
keep her from trying to save lives.
She rubbed her eyes and shut the cover of the latest issue of The
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