The Serpent's Shadow

Chapter Fifteen

MAYA was hiding in the hospital linen closet, wishing that the day was over and she could go home to a cold supper and a colder bath.

It had been a long, exhausting day—first at the clinic, then here at the hospital. To begin with, London had been suffering from a heat wave for a week, and today had begun not just warm, but hot, even by her standards. After spending the morning sweating and panting in her black linen suit through one emergency after another, she came home drenched and ready to drop. She hadn’t been able to face food, or even the thought of food, only glass after glass of tepid sweet tea. There was no ice; the ice man hadn’t yet made his delivery. There was no breeze, and she had ordered Gupta to send a boy to the baker for precooked pies they could eat cold so that he could put out the fire in the kitchen stove.

The suit she had worn all morning was ready to stand by itself; she took it off, took everything off, and couldn’t face putting all that hot black linen on again, nor the corsets, nor the layers of petticoats and camisoles. Retiring to the bathroom, she took a full cold bath, which finally made her feel less like a doll of melting wax, and wished that she could just stay there for the rest of the day.

But she had duty this afternoon at the hospital.

Finally, at the last possible moment, she pulled herself out of the bath and rummaged in the back of her closet for the garments she had brought from India, the clothing of coolest cotton gauze that she had worn when helping her father at the height of summer before the monsoons came. No corset, only a modesty vest and a lacy camisole to disguise the fact that she wasn’t wearing a corset. One petticoat, and short drawers, with the lightest of silk stockings. Then a girlish, cotton “lingerie dress” of the kind worn to garden parties in the stifling heat—loosely woven, reflective white, embellished with a froth of cotton lace, airy enough to be bearable. With this dress, she broke strict mourning. At the moment, it was either that, or die of heat stroke. If she looked more like a debutante at a garden party than a doctor, right now everyone else was so hot that no one seemed to have noticed what she was wearing. This dress was almost as comfortable and practical as her saris.

Almost as comfortable as a sari is not enough, not today. And she couldn’t wait to get back home and put one of her saris on, for even the white dress seemed an unbearable burden.

The wards were full of cholera and typhoid patients; weather like this, with no rain for a week and none in sight, was ripe for an outbreak as water supplies grew stagnant and tainted. She made Gupta boil every drop of water they used, and tried to convince her patients to do the same, but it was a fruitless battle. Her people couldn’t afford the fuel it took to boil water, even when it came from a pump that put out murky liquid that smelled like a cistern. That assumed they had something to boil it on; the poor often didn’t even have much of a fireplace in their little rooms, just a tiny grate barely big enough for a single pot or kettle. When they cooked for themselves, they often made up a dish and left it at the baker’s, to be put in the oven for a fee. Mostly, they ate cheap fare from street vendors—who also weren’t washing their hands or boiling their water.

The only reason they don’t all die of cholera and typhoid is probably because they mostly don’t drink water, they drink boiled tea or beer from a stall. Or gin.

The wards were like ovens. Only those with high fevers benefited, for to them, the air was cooler than they were. Poor things; there was ice here, but not for charity patients. People lay in their beds with a single sheet over them, sweating and in pain; the nurses couldn’t bring water to them fast enough and boiling teakettles for clean, sterilized drinking water only added to the heat. Maya had put every visiting relative to work, fanning the invalids and sponging their faces, and even that didn’t help much.

The only place she’d found that was even marginally cooler than the rest of the hospital was this small room for linen storage. Here, where the air smelled faintly of bleach and clean fabric, where the cries of those in the wards were muffled, and where she was, for the moment, alone, Maya rested her forehead on a shelf support and clung to it with both hands, hoping to find a little more energy to take her through the next two hours before she could go home. Tendrils of hair clung damply to her forehead and the back of her neck; her scalp was sweating, and the pompadour on the top of her head felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

I knew it would be like this. And I am helping them. I’m helping them more than most of the other doctors here are. Most—well, many, anyway—of the other doctors had made rounds early in the day before it became so terribly hot, and now were at home themselves, probably having iced gin and tonics. At least this once there was an advantage in being a woman. She could wear a cool dress here and a sari at home, but no gentleman would ever be seen, even in the comfort of his own parlor, without at least a linen suit coat, trousers, and fine shirt.

There were no surgeries scheduled in this heat, although, of course, if an emergency came in that needed immediate surgery, someone would have to be found to deal with it.

Pray God one doesn’t come in. The operating theaters were worse than ovens, with the skylights letting in the direct sunlight. The Female Theater didn’t bear thinking about, former attic as it was, and Maya swore to herself that if she had a woman come in needing an emergency operation, she was going to use the Men’s Theater, and damn the consequences.

Wounds went septic horribly fast in this heat; limbs that could be salvaged in cooler weather almost always had to be amputated. Please, no amputations today, she thought, almost in despair. I cannot deal with an amputation today, not on top of everything else—

“Hiding, are we?” said a detested voice from behind her, in a tone probably intended to be suave, that only sounded slimy. “And just what are you doing here where you shouldn’t be?”

Simon Parkening. Just what I needed to put a cap on my day. “I have every right to be here, Mister Parkening, since I work in this hospital,” Maya replied crisply, turning to face the interloper, and emphasizing the man’s lack of the honorific of “doctor.”

“I, however, would very much like to know why you are here. As far as I am aware, you have no need for hospital linens.”

Parkening’s eyes widened in momentary surprise, then a broad, smug grin spread over his face. “Well, well! If it isn’t the little lady doctor. I didn’t recognize you in such a very becoming gown. I thought you were some young wench on a larking visit, hiding from her beau.”

“Well, now that you know better, you can go on about your business,” Maya retorted, a queasy feeling rising in her stomach, her forehead starting to sweat with nervousness. She did not like the expression on Parkening’s face, nor the speculative look in his eyes. “I have a great deal of work to do, and I need to get back to it, and if you came to see your uncle, you’ll find him at his home.”

“That’s coming on a bit strong, don’t you think?” Parkening replied, taking a step nearer. “You can’t expect me to believe that you came here dressed like that—” he gestured at her gown, “—intending to work? Do you take me for a fool? You were waiting here to meet someone, weren’t you?”

To Maya’s horror, he moved closer.

“You’re hiding in here to meet with your lover, aren’t you?” he said, grinning nastily. “Who is it? That filthy Irishman? I suppose a little half-breed like you would take up with some mongrel like him—”

Suddenly his hands shot out, and he seized her by the upper arms before she could move.

“You ought to try a real white man, not a miserable dog of a Mick,” he continued, then pulled her to him with a jerk, forcing his mouth down on hers. His teeth ground into her lips as he tried to force them open with his tongue. He crushed her against his chest in a cruelly hard grip with one hand clenched tight enough to bruise her biceps, while his free hand groped for her breast, pawing at her with lust. She couldn’t open her mouth to scream without getting his filthy tongue down her throat.

But something in her reacted to the outrage with potent fury.

No!

Shock galvanized her and filled her with diamond-hard hate; they combined in a single moment of sheer outrage, and before she thought, she struck at him—but not with her fists, with her mind.

Earth-born power rose within her unbidden; lava-hot with rage, it welled up inside her and overflowed, all in an instant. She couldn’t have controlled it if she’d wanted to, and she didn’t want to. It rose up in a mountainous wave, paused, and avalanched down on Simon Parkening, smashing him with a crushing blow before she could take a smothered breath.

He choked, let her go; she staggered backward a pace, and he dropped like a stone, sprawling on the floor of the storage room as if a champion boxer had just laid him out.

Maya gasped, and stumbled back into the support of the shelves, one hand on the upright, the other at her bruised lips.

What have I done? Is he dead?

For one long moment she could hardly breathe for the panic that thought triggered. But then, when Parkening groaned and stirred a little, sense reasserted itself, and her outrage returned.

I defended myself, that’s what I’ve done! And there’s nothing wrong with that! As anger broke through the shock and allowed her to think again, Parkening brought up both hands, slowly, to his head, and curled into a fetal position. From the look of him, he wasn’t going to wake up very soon, and when he did—he’d be hurting. She put out her hand, slowly, to get a sense of what she’d done to him.

Something—like a concussion. Serves you right, you—you cad! she thought at him, hot anger choking her and making her flush. If I didn’t know that your uncle would blame me for this, I’d turn you in to him, I would!

But Clayton-Smythe would take one look at her, and probably decide that she had tried to seduce his nephew, and not the other way around. No—this would have to do for punishment. She bent over and touched him on the shoulder—briefly—just long enough to determine exactly how much damage she’d done.

Not enough, she thought with scorn, her insides twisted with the wish that she had been able to do more than merely strike him. He’ll just have the devil of a headache when he wakes up. It probably won’t be any worse than the hangovers he has all the time. Wonder at her own strength broke through the anger then; she’d had no idea she could hurt someone as well as heal them! I wonder what he’ll think I did? Probably that I hit him with the nearest bedpan.

Well, she had—it just wasn’t what he’d think she’d hit him with.

Enough dithering. What do I look like? She spent a moment putting her dress back in order, and patted her hair into place. Above all, she had to make certain no one would suspect that she and Parkening had so much as exchanged a greeting, much less what he had actually attempted. Her reputation was at stake here, and she dared allow nothing to mar it. There. Now—fix this situation—

For the first time that day, she blessed the heat, blessed the fact that no one had actually seen her go into this room, and stepped over his body.

“Nurse!” she called shrilly, backing out of the door hastily, as if she had only just stepped in. “Nurse! Bring an orderly! There’s a man on the floor of the linen room with heat stroke!”

The head ward nurse came running at her call, with an orderly following. She pursed her lips when she recognized Simon Parkening, but said nothing except, “Well! Master Parkening, is it? Now what business did he have here?”

Maya shrugged as if it was of no moment. “Is it Parkening, Nurse Haredy? I didn’t recognize him. I don’t know or care,” she replied, supervising the orderly who hauled the unconscious man up and draped a limp arm over his shoulder. “But if we don’t get him off the charity ward and into a private bed with all the little comforts, his uncle will blame us.”

The head nurse frowned, then suddenly smiled. “Nurse Fortenbrase with all her airs can have the care of him, and I’ll be washing my hands of him,” she told the orderly, who hauled a groaning Parkening off to a wheeled stretcher for transport to a better class of care.

“I wish I could trade him weight-for-weight for a block of ice,” Maya said sourly, startling a laugh out of the Nurse Haredy. “Well, let’s get on with it. Just because a spoiled brat faints in our ward the work doesn’t stop.”

“True enough, Doctor,” the nurse nodded, and the two of them went back to tending people who deserved better care than Simon Parkening, but unfortunately weren’t likely to get it.

At last, at long last, Maya was finished; about eight o’clock, with two hours yet to full dark. She had done all she could for people who would either get better or die on their own. She had secretly imparted a breath of healing strength to each of the ones that seemed to be faltering, and it had taken everything she had left to finish the rounds of the wards afterwards. She was so tired, in fact, that she didn’t even have the strength to catch a ‘bus; fortunately there was an empty cab right at the foot of the steps, and despite the expense, she fell into it, giving her address to the driver.

“Take your time; don’t force your horse,” she told him through the hatch above, grateful that this was a hansom and not a motor cab. She didn’t think she could bear the clattering and fumes of an engine so close to her right now.

The cabby’s sweating, red face broke into a smile of gratitude. “Thenkee, Miss,” he told her. “It’s cruel hard on a beast today.”

“It’s cruel hard on a man,” she replied, “Let’s not make it any worse for both of you than it already is.”

She wanted to lean back, but the horsehair upholstery was prickly and unbearable in this heat, so she put her bag at her feet and leaned forward instead. She watched the horse’s swaying posterior in front of her as it ambled along at the same speed as the rest of the traffic, and had to fight to keep from falling into a dull, half-trance. The street was mostly in shadow, with hot, golden bars of sun streaked across the tops of the buildings or passing between them. The sky, an eye-watering blue overlaid with a golden haze of dust, promised nothing but more of the same for tomorrow.

This was death weather; heat and cold were equally punishing for the poor. Babies gasped in the heat and died; cholera and typhoid took off their elder siblings and their parents. If this heat kept on for much longer, there would be more bodies carried out of the hospital than there were patients coming in. The brassy-blue sky glared down on them with no pity and no help.

It has to break. Everyone says so. It has to break, it can’t keep on like this. She took her handkerchief from her bag and wiped her face; it came away filthy with dust and sweat. I’m one of the fortunate, and I don’t know how much longer I can bear this. She could afford ice, she had servants to do all the hard work of cleaning and cooking and looking after her. The poor had no ice, not a breath of breeze, their food spoiled before they could eat it, and they had to eat it anyway and sickened and died of food poisoning along with all the other forms of death that stalked them. They had no cooler clothes, it was wear what they had or strip half-naked and bear the consequences. She knew very well how much better her life was than that of her poorest patients, but it was hard to reflect on one’s blessings when one felt so miserable.

The heat meant that there were fewer of her “ladies” about to add to the family coffers with their fees. Most of them weren’t even here in London, for a good many of them were holidaying within reach of their wealthy clients, who were also on holiday—at the sea, in the country, even across the sea at resorts in Italy, France, anyplace cooler than here.

The rest, the actresses, the dancers, the music-hall singers—they were making do, just as she was, with iced drinks, walks in the dusk, open windows. The only difference between Maya’s circumstances and those of the actresses was that they did most of their work at night—but the theaters were stifling, the limelights and gaslights hot, and the one advantage they had was that they could work half-naked.

Sometimes rather more than half, she thought wryly. She’d been called to theaters for girls who had collapsed in the heat during rehearsals at the beginning of this weather, but that hadn’t happened in a couple of days. The dancers and actresses were good at following her advice, better than more respectable folk.

Traffic thinned as they neared her neighborhood, both because there were fewer people about this close to suppertime, and because there were fewer calls for wheeled vehicles around here. On the road itself, there was little but the occasional cart and hand-barrow, and along the pavement, there were mostly children playing now that the heat of the day was over.

There it was—her own front door at last; she heaved a sigh of relief and mopped her brow once again, then tucked her handkerchief back in her bag and prepared to get out as the cab stopped in front of her door.

Gupta had been out scouring the steps again; they looked as if you could eat off them. She couldn’t imagine how he’d done it.

She paid the driver, picked up her bag, and heaved it out of the cab. The horse ambled off immediately. There was not much prospect for a fare around here, and the cabby was anxious to get back to a spot with better prospects. It was almost too much effort to pull open her door, and she thanked God that there were no patients waiting for her in the dark, shadowed hallway as she stepped inside.

She left her bag just inside the door of her office, gathered up her skirts in both hands, and climbed the stairs, one slow, panting step at a time. But when she got to her room, she saw that her people had already anticipated her wishes; there was one of her saris laid out on the bed waiting for her, an everyday sari of cool blue silk with a darker blue border woven into the ends, and the short-sleeved top to match.

With a cry of joy, she flung off her English clothes, unwilling to bear the clinging weight a moment more.

Wrapping the intricate folds was a matter of habit; in less time than it took to put on one of her European gowns and all its accouterments, she was comfortable at last, barefoot, with her hair down and tied back in a single tail, the silk swishing softly around her bare legs and creating its own little breeze as she moved.

And when she came downstairs, there was another surprise.

Hanging in the ceiling of the conservatory was a punkah-fan, a huge slab of muslin stretched on a hinged frame so that it looked very like a door, meant to be swung back and forth by a rope attached to its bottom edge. In this case, the frame of the fan was tied to the decorative ironwork supporting the glass ceiling, and the rope ran to a pulley on the wall, and was attached to a wicker rocking chair. She could rock and fan herself with very little effort.

And Gupta was waiting with—at last!—a glorious pitcher of iced lemonade and a bowl of fresh fruit and cheese, and a broad smile on his face.

“You—are—a magician!” she exclaimed, embracing him as he put down the pitcher and plate on a little table beside the chair.

“Not I,” he protested, a broad smile on his brown face. “How difficult is it to make a punkah-fan for one who has had such all his life? A little cloth, a bit of wood—nothing! I only wish I had known that this cold country could become so very warm three or four weeks ago, so that all would have been in place for you before this.”

“Gupta, thank you; your protests don’t fool me a bit. I have no idea how you got that thing up there.” She waved at the fan overhead.

“You may thank little Charan for that. He managed to take the first ropes over the iron. After that, it was nothing, we merely hauled the punkah up and tied it in place. When it is cooler, if you like, we can bring it down again.”

Charan tugged at her sari, chattering; she bent and he leaped into her arms to put his arms around her neck. Now she saw how the ropes that held the fan up were tied off to stanchions, one at either side of the conservatory. “You clever man!” she told the langur, who put his cheek against hers, and chuckled.

“The ice man has come, and I have obtained an extra block,” Gupta told her. “Since it will melt so fast in this heat. And it seemed to me that it would be better to have cold, fresh things to eat than some pie from a strange baker with I know-not-what in it.”

“Wise choice, and thank you.” She settled into her rocking chair and looked up with delight as the fan moved, creating a stirring in the air. “Oh, Gupta, thank you so much!”

Gupta bowed, smiling, and left her alone to enjoy the first cold drink of the day.

As the chair moved, so did the fan, creating a delicious breeze. After the first glass of lemonade, her appetite returned and she was able to enjoy Gupta’s selections.

Very clever of him not to have any meats, she thought. It wouldn’t be wise to trust to anything like meat or fish to stay unspoiled in this weather, even stored in an ice box.

When the meal was gone, she remained where she was, rocking slowly to keep the air moving, as dusk descended and darkness filled the conservatory.

But as her discomfort eased and she was able to relax, emotions that she had purposely bottled up came flooding up unexpectedly, and she began to shiver with suppressed rage that had been pent up for too long.

I am going to burn that dress, she thought, her head throbbing in time with her pulse, and her face flooding with heat. Or give it away. She scrubbed at her lips with a napkin, as the memory of Parkening’s mouth on hers made her feel nauseous. She shook with the desire to strike him all over again. Oh, that beast, I would like to break his hands so he can never touch me again! I want to black both his eyes! I want—oh, I want—if only I could clip his manhood for him!

That was the thing that made her want to run up to her room and never come out again. He would surely try to molest her again, and she was sickeningly sure he hadn’t any intention of stopping at a kiss.

The animals must have sensed her disturbed emotions and wisely left her alone to deal with them herself. Right at the moment, she didn’t want anything touching her; she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t strike at it.

She shook with conflicting emotions, wanting to kill him, wanting to run away, afraid of him, white-hot with anger at him. She heard the doorbell, but ignored it; if it was a patient, Gupta would come and get her. She hoped it wasn’t a patient, that it was just some tradesman that Gupta could deal with or send away. Right now she didn’t want to have to face a patient, not when she was so uncertain of her own control over herself. For at the moment, all of her emotions had given way before a terrible, black despair, and the certainty that she could never go back to the hospital again, nor out on the street, nor anywhere that Parkening might find her.

“Maya?” There had been no footsteps to warn her of Peter Scott’s approach, but he was normally soft-footed. His voice startled her; she rose swiftly and turned to face him, the light from the hall lamp falling on her face, and her wide and dilated eyes. His face was in shadow, but there was no mistaking the gasp he uttered. Nor the words he blurted out. “Maya, my God—you are beautiful—” His honest, clean reaction undid her. With a sob, she flung herself into his astonished arms.

“…and the bitch hit me,” Simon Parkening whined, for the tenth time. Shivani was heartily tired of his complaining. So far as she could make out, he had tried to seduce some hospital servant and been repulsed; why should she care? If he could not carry out a successful conquest on his own, how was she supposed to help him? He could use magic if he chose; he had the modicum of power needed to overcome a woman’s reluctance, and the knowledge of how to apply it. If he failed to use what he had, what was she supposed to do about it?

Punkah-fans operated by ropes going through holes in the wall to two of her servants in the next room kept the air stirring, but the fact that there was no breeze outside meant that the room was stiflingly hot, the air heavy with the incense she burned to keep away the stench of the street outside. It was no worse than the stink of Delhi, but it was not a familiar stink, and therefore she hated it. She did not want Parkening here; he had come of his own, straight, it seemed, from the hospital and he stank of disease and despair. Why he had come here and not to his club where he might have a better reception for his complaints among his fellow sahibs, she was not certain.

Unless it was that he could not rail freely about what had made him so angry anywhere else. Perhaps his conduct was not acceptable even to similar arrogant English males, and he knew it.

She was far more interested in what he could tell her about the hospital, but from the moment he had walked in the door, all he had done was to whine about his problems. It was too hot. He couldn’t leave London because his firm wouldn’t allow him to take a holiday. He was tired of his current mistress, but the woman he wanted was the property of another and he didn’t dare challenge the man for her. And the girl he had tried to seduce in the hospital that afternoon in his boredom and frustration had turned against him and struck him.

She yawned under the cover of her veil—and stopped with her mouth open, struck numb by his next words as his anger increased, as he uttered the first original thing he had said since he first began to whine.

“—that damned half-breed bitch, acting like a white woman, aping her betters, pretending to be a doctor—”

Shivani throttled her own impulse to interrupt his raving. She did not want him to know she was interested in what he had said. He would use it to try to manipulate her. He had done this before, and this time she was in no mood to fence with him, placate him, or give in to his demands. He was coming to the end of his usefulness, and was no longer worth the time it took to work with him. She would listen to him rant, and wait him out.

She had patience, more patience than he. And to make him more loquacious, she surreptitiously added a handful of drugs to the single block of charcoal in the incense brazier below her. Could it be? Could it possibly be that she had found her sister’s child?

Carefully, surreptitiously, she opened her Third Eye, and practically snorted her contempt for his blindness aloud. How could he possibly have thought the girl had struck him physically, when he practically reeked of the power that had been used to render him unconscious? How could he have missed something so blindingly obvious? Perhaps only because he himself was so stubbornly blind. It would never have occurred to him that the girl could have as much or more power than he, therefore he had never looked for the signs of it. Stupid swine.

She couldn’t tell much from the residue, but in a way, she felt a grudging admiration for the girl that had done this, even if it did prove to be the traitor she sought. The girl had, after all, managed to knock him unconscious without actually damaging him in any way.

But that might simply be a matter of accident rather than control. Admittedly, striking a man dead in the midst of a crowded building would leave one with a corpse that could prove very difficult to explain—but the man was a sahib, and arrogant sahibs were prone to do foolish things that caused them to die with great suddenness. There would be no marks on the body to explain, and heat did kill. And with every moment that passed, Shivani considered that if it had been her and not the unknown who had been molested, Parkening would be in his coffin at this very moment.

As the drugs filled the air, she armored herself against their effect, while waiting for them to loosen Parkening’s tongue further.

She did not have long to wait.

Before long, Parkening embarked on a long, rambling condemnation of two of the doctors in the hospital, the one that Shivani was interested in, and a second, an Irishman, that Shivani could not have cared less about.

Unfortunately, this was the one that Parkening blamed for all his misfortune, so this was the one he expounded at length upon.

Great length. Shivani was getting ready to strike him down herself if he didn’t get to the girl soon. How on earth could this fool be so obsessed with a man who probably didn’t even think about him unless Parkening did something to interfere with him? If the Irish doctor was not his enemy yet, Parkening seemed determined to make an enemy of him. Was his life so very empty that he had to go out of his way to create enemies to enliven it?

Finally, he got around to the woman in the case.

“—O’Reilly’s mistress,” he growled. “She must be, I’m sure of it. Why no one but me has spotted it—she’d be thrown out of the hospital in a moment, if I could get the proof. Fornication; can’t have that in my hospital. Very deep, that one. Must be her. Couldn’t be O’Reilly, he hasn’t the brains. But that half-breed—mongrel vigor, that’s what it is. Cunning. Not brains, but cunning. Should have guessed it. Bloody wogs. Hindoos—can’t trust ‘em, too cunning by half.”

He seemed to have forgotten that Shivani, upon whom he depended for his further magical instruction and before whom he sat, was Indian; she did snort with contempt at that faux pas, but the drugs had taken him far enough that he didn’t even notice.

“Says her father was a doctor. Ha! Probably some ranker. Probably some Cockney Tommy. And if he married her mother I’d be surprised. Half-Hindoo wog bitch. Hit me! Me!” There was a fleck of foam on his mustache, and his eyes had begun to glaze. He would probably pass out shortly; she would have to have her servants revive him. Or—perhaps not. Perhaps she would simply have them bundle him into a cab and leave him to deal with cab and cabby when he arrived on his own doorstep. If he was lucky, the cabby would summon his servants. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t wake up again, a body would be found in the Thames, and the cabby would be much, much richer. There was no telling which sort he’d get in this neighborhood.

It was of no great matter to Shivani; she had decided now that he was a risk and a nuisance, and she was going to be rid of him. She did not wish draw attention to herself and her dacoits and thugee by murdering him herself, but she would banish him from this place from now on.

“Witherspoon.” He snorted. “A concocted name if ever I heard one! Doctor-my-ass Maya Witherspoon! Not bloody likely! Bastard bitch half-wog—b—b—b—”

He began to splutter, as if he no longer had any control over his tongue. He probably didn’t; by now he had breathed in enough intoxicant to fell most men. His head wobbled loosely on his shoulders. He blinked, shook his head.

Then his eyes rolled up, and he dropped over onto the cushions in an untidy heap.

Shivani rang for the servants. Two of them came immediately, bowing to her with utmost servility.

“Take him away,” she said languidly, waving a hand at him. “Put him in a cab, or drop him in the river, I care not which. Only take his stinking body from my sight, and do not admit him to my presence anymore. I am weary of him.”

They bowed again, and hauled him off. They would probably put him in a cab, but only because it was too far to drag him to the river, and there was always at least one cab waiting outside the house of pleasure on the corner.

Shivani got up, and stretched, no longer languid. She had a great deal to do, for now she had a person, and a name. Revenge—and power—would be hers.

It was only a matter of time now.

Shivani flung back her veil, and smiled into the night.