The Serpent's Shadow

Chapter Thirteen

MAYA bound her head with a strip of toweling to absorb the inevitable drops of perspiration from her forehead, then donned an enveloping apron that had been bleached in lye, then boiled. There was no proper sink for the surgeons to wash at in the female operating theater, only a basin and a pitcher of water, but she scrubbed her hands and arms as best she could anyway, using the harshest soap obtainable. The atomizer was full of carbolic acid to disinfect, and she would see to it that before this operation was over, it was empty.

“Maya,” said Doctor O’Reilly, as he dried his scrubbed hands on a scrupulously clean towel, “thank you. This is not an easy case of mine that you’ve taken.”

She turned to smile wanly at the Irishman, who, not being a surgeon, was acting as her anesthetist. O’Reilly’s expression betrayed his strain despite the concealment of his red beard and mustache; he was only too correct that this was “not an easy case.”

“After the way you helped with that little problem of mine, I could hardly refuse, now, could I? Besides, you know what anyone else would do with this girl.”

“Take appendix, uterus, and child, without a second thought,” O’Reilly said grimly. “And she a good Catholic girl, and this her first child! It would break her heart.”

“If she lived through it,” Maya replied, just as grimly. “Doctor, if I can save this girl without removing anything but what’s diseased, you know I will.”

The patient in question, who was one of O’Reilly’s, a young Irish woman who had been brought in thinking she was miscarrying of her first child, was in fact in the throes of an attack of acute appendicitis. She might come through this attack without surgery to remove the diseased organ, but neither her doctor nor Maya thought it at all likely. When this had been made plain to her—and the fact that she must have surgery immediately—her first thought had been for her unborn child. She had begged Maya, clutching Maya’s skirt with both hands, to save her baby.

She was with her priest now, for even now the removal of an appendix was a risky procedure. If it had burst—if it was perforated—and the infection had spread within the body cavity—well, there was very little chance that she would survive. Her seven-month pregnancy made things doubly complicated. Maya hoped that the priest was human enough to give her absolution before she must go under the knife; whatever such blessing meant or did not mean to the girl’s immortal soul, it would surely make her calmer.

As O’Reilly had pointed out, any other surgeon would simply excise the uterus and its contents without a pause, simply to remove that complication. After all, the girl was a charity patient, a nobody, and if she complained, no one would care. It wasn’t as if she was a woman of good birth who was expected to produce an heir for a family with money or social standing. She’d even be better off without the handicap of breeding a brat a year—

Or so the male Protestant physicians would say. And never mind how she would feel.

The Female Operating Theater, located in the attic of the Female Wing, was stiflingly hot now that it was late into July. Why they couldn’t have used the regular operating theater—

Because the women cry and carry on so, it might disturb the male patients. As if the men don’t cry and carry on just as much. Or—women are embarrassed to be prepared for surgery in the same room as the men. As if, at that point, they are thinking of anything but the surgery to come.

The excuses made no sense, for they were only that, excuses. But at least, being at the top of the building, there was not as much room for observers here—and the light was excellent, for the theater had been provided with two broad skylights.

Since it was Maya who operated here today, it was Maya who made the rules for this case. She had abolished the practice of leaving the bloodstained aprons on hooks to be used and reused until they were stiff. Aprons were bleached with lye and boiled, then wrapped in clean paper and stored here until use. After the conclusion of an operation, used aprons were taken away immediately to be boiled and bleached again. Water was never left in the pitcher; it was brought fresh before each surgery. Physician and assistants scrubbed hands and arms up to the elbow—in Maya’s case, higher than that—and the carbolic atomizer was as much a fixture as the ether mask. Maya used only her own personal set of surgical implements, because she made sure to keep her own scalpels sharp and sterile, and didn’t trust those left for the use of others.

And all those preparations would be in vain if that poor girl’s appendix was not intact.

“Bring her in,” Maya instructed, when her hands were just short of raw, O’Reilly and the nurse went to fetch the girl, and Maya saw to the laying out of her surgical instruments on the tray beside the wooden table.

O’Reilly carried the girl in his arms into the antechamber, wrapped in a clean sheet. She was in too much pain to walk, and in any case, Maya didn’t want her to do anything that might stress that appendix. He put the patient down on the narrow table, giving her a reassuring smile before placing the prepared mask over her mouth and nose and pouring the anesthetic on it.

When she was asleep, they wheeled her into the operating theater and lifted her onto the immovable table. Maya adjusted the sheet she’d been wrapped in to expose as little as possible of anything other than the surgical site, then wiped the site itself clean with carbolic solution. Some physicians not only operated on patients while clothed in their street clothes, but on patients who were also still in their street clothes. and as unwashed as they had come in. This girl had been stripped and bathed by the nurses in the outer room, then wrapped in a sheet that, like the aprons. was boiled and bleached and kept wrapped in sterile paper until use. The plain, deal table had an inclined plane at one end to elevate the girl’s head, and was covered with a piece of brown oilcloth. Once again, Maya’s rules held sway here today; the oilcloth was new and had been wiped down with carbolic before being placed on the table.

As usual, the theater, was full—there was a reason why it was called a “theater.” The actual amount of floor space devoted to the operation was small in comparison with the tiers of stand-places rising for four rows, at an angle of sixty degrees, so that those standing in each tier could have an unobstructed view of the operation below. The students’ entrance was at the top tier, and a metal rail on which to lean ran at the edge of each tier. It was the students’ business to attend every operation he (or rarely, she) possibly could, so even Maya’s operations were fully attended, and she was by no means a famous surgeon.

Today, however, there seemed to be more visitors than students. The usual hum of voices contained was louder, and there were finer coats in the audience than was normal.

But Maya didn’t bother to examine her audience, not when there was far more pressing business at hand. The quicker she could operate, the less blood the girl would lose; next to infection, it was blood loss that carried off the largest number of patients after an otherwise successful procedure. But by the same token, she had to be as careful as she was quick. Being too hasty could mean she would slice through major vessels, or worse.

She adjusted the box full of sawdust under the table with her foot, nudging it to the place where she judged that the blood from the surgery was likeliest to begin dripping. Then, with a glance at O’Reilly and a nod to her dressers, Maya went to work.

She had planned this operation carefully in her mind as she and the patient were in preparation. The position and size of the uterus meant that nothing was straightforward. She took her scalpel and made her incision.

Almost immediately a cry arose from the tiers of “Heads! Heads!” since her own head and body obscured the small incision she had made. She ignored the cry, concentrating on making her cut so that she did not cut across any major vessels. Blood began to trickle down the girl’s hip, onto the oilcloth, to drip into the pan of sawdust beneath the table.

Maya did not get the benefit of having as many dressers and attendants as she wanted; there was no one vying for the honor of holding her instruments or otherwise helping with the operation. There was no one to sponge the sweat from her forehead; hence the strip of toweling. She was not going to go through all the work of sterilizing patient and surface only to have it all ruined by sweat dropping into the open incision and contaminating the site.

She nodded at O’Reilly, who put the ether mask aside and sprayed carbolic over the incision and her hands. He would do this all through the operation, for as long as there was an open wound. The clamor of “Heads!” continued; she continued to ignore it.

“I can’t believe it!” drawled a loud and obnoxiously familiar voice. “She’s not taking the uterus!”

Maya kept herself from jerking around to stare at Simon Parkening in anger and disbelief only by a supreme act of will. That same will kept her hands steady as derisive shouts arose from other lungs. The voices were uniformly unfamiliar; so that was why the theater was so full! Parkening had packed it with his own cronies with the purpose of disturbing the operation!

“Steady, Doctor,” came O’Reilly’s low voice, as a bleat of “Stupid cow!” was aimed at her from the tiers above. “This is aimed at me, not at you.”

“I will be damned,” she replied through gritted teeth, “if I let a pack of piddling puppies interfere with my work!”

But of course it was going to interfere, if only by disturbing her helpers. Twice Maya had to raise her voice to be heard by her dressers over the boos, hisses, and catcalls coming down from above. Her hands started to shake, and she had to stop to steady herself as her impotent anger overwhelmed her own control.

“Now you see why females should never be surgeons!” Simon mocked. “Sentimental! She’s going to kill her patient with sentiment over a fetus! By God, they shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine at all! They haven’t the nerve for it! Just look at the puny little incision she’s made! Is she afraid of a little blood?”

A burst of laughter followed.

“Not that it would make any difference, one Irish bitch more or less in the world to pour out litters of whelps every year,” Simon continued with an air of casual glee. “They breed like flies anyway.”

Maya actually heard O’Reilly’s teeth grinding.

“Steady, Doctor,” she told him.

But that last comment seemed to have gone a bit far, even for Parkening’s friends. The catcalls died down, and there was an uneasy note to the muttering. “I say—” someone objected weakly. “Out of order, old man.”

Maya had her hands full—literally. She was trying to locate the appendix by feel, through an incision too small for the pregnant uterus to bulge through. There were whispers of “What’s she doing?” that she ignored completely, deciding at last to trust to instinct—and a little magic. She willed the thing to come into her fingers, concentrating a trickle of power into her hands, thinking of the diseased organ as an enemy that was trying to escape her. It’s there, somewhere… hot, diseased… like the polluted soil outside my house.

She sensed it now, a swollen malevolence lurking beneath her fingers. Concentrating all her will on it, the hecklers and the theater receded to a mere whisper of annoyance in the background, inconsequential as the buzzing of a fly on a windowpane. She used her anger as power, poured it into her questing fingers. Into my hands, damn you.

Then, suddenly, she got a tip of her finger on it. It felt so hot it seemed to burn her hand, but she twisted her fingers after it, caught it, and slid it carefully into view in the center of the incision.

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!”

“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 and graphic obscenities promising that the shouter would inflict a great deal more than a simple beating if he got his hands on one of the women.

Maya kept her eyes on the girls ahead of her, but she couldn’t help but shiver internally. She considered herself to be brave, but it seemed to her that there was no doubt many of those men would do exactly as they threatened if they could catch a suffragette alone.

They were so angry! How could a demand by women that they have a right that these men had and didn’t even value enough to exercise be so threatening to them? Why should they care?

Perhaps because if they “allow” us to vote, they will have to treat us as equals? Unbidden, memories arose with each step on the pavement, echoing in her mind in concert with the marching cadence behind her. So many women coming into the Fleet beaten within an inch of their lives—with broken bones or flesh not just bruised but pulped. So long as the woman didn’t die, it was perfectly legal for a father or husband to treat her worse than a dog or a horse! He could starve her, beat her, torture her, abuse her in any way his mind could encompass. He could make her sleep on the dirt floor of a cellar dressed only in rags, force her to work until she dropped, then force her to turn over the fruits of her labor to him. She was his property, to do with as he willed, and the force of the law was behind him.

And then there were those who did die; all the man had to do was to claim he had caught “his” woman in adultery, and the law released him to the streets, to do the same to another woman, and another, and another.

Even among men who counted themselves as civilized and would not dream of physically hurting a female, there was the repeated and deliberate starvation of woman’s intellect. Consider the refusal of male instructors to teach women subjects they considered improper—that was the reason the London School of Medicine for Women had been founded in the first place. For heaven’s sake, Oxford hadn’t even granted degrees to women in anything until the end of last century!

And the marriage laws! While a father lived, no matter how incompetent, a woman’s property could be handled (or mishandled) by him. Once married, it belonged to her husband, again to be treated as he willed! Even when a woman earned money by her own work, it belonged to him! The only time a woman could be free from interference was when father and husband (if she had one) were both dead—and even then, any male relative who wished to have what she had earned could have her brought into court and declared incompetent! She had seen that happen, to women who were too intimidated to fight back, or those who lost in the court to a lawyer with a smoother tongue (or a readier hand with a bribe) than hers had been!

With every step, with every memory, her fear fled, and her anger rose. Last of all came the most recent memories, of Simon Parkening and his cronies heckling both her and her unconscious, helpless patient, afraid of her competence, and trying to overmaster her with brutal words because they could not beat her into submission.

And neither they, nor these other beasts will beat us down! she thought, her anger now bringing new energy to her steps, so that she raised her head and glared at the hecklers in the streets with white-hot rage in her eyes. Go ahead! she challenged silently. Threaten me all you like! You only prove that you are worse than the brute animals!

“Votes for Women” was only the battle cry, the hook upon which all else depended. It was emancipation of women that was the real issue—for until women could vote, they could never change the laws that oppressed them and made them slaves.

Maya was not the only one mustering anger as a weapon against the mob; she saw now that others were glaring at their tormentors with equal defiance as they marched. In the younger girls, the defiance was mixed partly with fear, but mostly with excitement. Perhaps they had not yet had enough experience with the worst that men could do for the fear to seem very real to them. But in the older women, it was clear that the anger had overmastered the fear, and their glares were intended to shame the instruments of that fear.

Sometimes it even worked, when they could actually catch and hold the eyes of those who shouted so angrily at the marchers. Now and again, a man stopped in mid-shout, his mouth gaping foolishly. His face flushed, he dropped his eyes, and he slunk into the crowd. But there was always another shoving forward to take his place.

At this moment, Maya almost hated Men, the entire brutal race of them.

Almost. For there were men among the marchers, and not the cowed, hen-pecked specimens depicted in the cartoons of the critical press either. Men who were braver and stronger than the ones shouting on the line of march, because they weren’t afraid of women who were just as brave and strong as they were! For their sake, Maya could not take the easy route of condemning the whole sex—only those who were too cowardly, weak, and ignorant to bear the thought of losing their domination over those that should have been their partners.

At last their goal came within sight. Parliament, where the marchers were going to lay their coffin, fill it with stones until it was too heavy to lift, and some of the women were going to chain themselves to it and to the railings of the stairs and the fences. These women would be arrested and dragged off to prison, of course, where they would also go on hunger strikes, and be force-fed—

And die, perhaps. Until shame overtakes those in authority and the murdering stops!

Amelia worked her way up through the marchers to Maya’s side. “As soon as we gather and start to fill the coffin, you and I need to slip off,” Amelia said quietly, under the muffled drumming and the shouts.

“I feel horrible to leave them,” Maya said, looking about her at the determined faces of the women around her.

“You and I fight the fight where we are working, and we are needed there,” Amelia told her, although she, too, looked guiltily at the others who marched past them and began to solemnly place the stones each one carried into the now-open coffin. “Who would take our place, guarding the Bridgets and the Alices of London from the Clayton-Smythes and Simon Parkenings who treat them like so many disposable experiments?”

Maya sighed and nodded, although it was hard to leave those others here to face whatever fate and the police had in store for them. Hidden from the jeering onlookers by the other women around them, they removed their sashes and handed them to one of the others—nor were they the only ones who were taking off sashes and blending back into the crowd. The drummers formed a semicircle, continuing the death-march rhythm and distracting the eyes from those who were slipping away. Now that the marchers had reached Parliament, there were other people thronging the streets than merely those who had gathered to jeer, and it was much easier to move to the edge of the group and slip off to hide among them. Most of the women here would not be among those who courted arrest. Several, like Amelia and Maya, would not even remain here unchained to risk it.

But she still felt horribly guilty as she tucked her stethoscope into her bag and squeezed past a couple—a nursemaid and her beau—who were craning their necks to see what was going on to cause such an uproar.

Once past the crowd, she and Amelia walked briskly away, unmolested even by those who had been shouting at them a few moments before. Without that white sash branding them as suffragettes, men looked right past them as things of no threat, and hence, no importance.

And perhaps that spoke of their contempt and disregard for all women even more than the shouting. It certainly spoke eloquently of their blindness.