“You’re very welcome.” Maya looked at the benches in the hall as the girl skipped out the door. There was one patient waiting, a woman who seemed a little shabbier than her usual run, and was coughing. The brown dress had once been fine velvet, but now was so rubbed that there was scarcely anything left of the pile anywhere, and it didn’t look to have been cleaned or brushed in months. The girl had a new silk kerchief around her neck, her hair put up inexpertly beneath a bonnet that was liberally trimmed with motheaten feathers and stained rosettes of ribbon. She looked to be a little younger than the dancer who had just left; sixteen or seventeen, but older than her years.
Much older. Those eyes have seen more than anyone should see in a lifetime.
“Yes?” Maya said as the girl looked up, with a peculiar expression of mingled hope and fear of rejection on her face. “I take it that you are waiting to see me?”
“Oi carn’t pay ye,” the girl said flatly.
“You can, but not necessarily in money,” Maya replied—and at the girl’s look of alarm, she shook her head. “No, not like that, not what you’re thinking. Come into the examining room and tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll see what we can do about it.”
Slowly, reluctantly, the girl rose. Just as slowly, she sidled into the office, then into the examination room when Maya directed her to go onward. She looked about her with the wariness of a cornered animal, and was only a little less alarmed when Maya motioned to her to take a seat on the chair rather than the table.
She’s not a whore—or not just a whore. She’s a pickpocket, I think, Maya decided, sizing up her patient. She’d been expecting someone on the wrong side of the law to turn up sooner or later, but to have it be a female was beyond her hopes or expectations. This was going to present an excellent opportunity for a number of possibilities.
Maya remained standing. “The trouble is not your cough, I think,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and regarding the girl, who looked ready to bolt at any moment. “A good ruse to get past Gupta, but I believe you’ve come for another reason entirely.”
The thief’s eyes widened with surprise, then she shook her head. “Oi ‘eard—ye know ways.”
“Ways?” Maya thought she knew what the girl meant, but intended to find out for certain.
“Ways—not t’ ‘ave babies.” The girl shuffled her feet and looked at the tips of her worn, cracked boots, then looked up at Maya defiantly. “Oi ‘eard from someun’ at th’ Odeon.”
Maya nodded. “I do. Some are more certain than others. Some will cost you money, not for me, but for what you need to prevent a baby. So, that’s what you want, then? Can you read?”
Again the girl nodded, almost defiantly. “Oi kin read, but wot’s that got t’ do wi’ it?”
“Because I’m going to give you one of each of these.” Maya went to the cupboard, and being careful to block what she was doing from the girl, opened a concealed panel and took out a pair of small, printed booklets from a stack of several like them. Possession of these booklets, which had been judged “obscene and pornographic” by men who should have been ashamed of themselves for making such a judgment, could have gotten her in a world of trouble. Distributing them, even more so.
Even though any man can walk into his club with a copy of The Lustful Turk or Fanny Hill under his arm and no one would so much as blink an eye, she thought resentfully. And he can show his Japanese pillow book or illustrated Kama Sutra to select friends over brandy and cigars and be congratulated on his acquisition and refined tastes. But Anna Besant’s The Law of Population and Dr. Allison’s Book for Married Women are obscene, and cannot be permitted.
Of course, as a lady, she wasn’t supposed to know about those erotic books the men so enjoyed at their liberty at all, much less the titles of them. She certainly wasn’t supposed to know about the two “bibles” of contraception. Nor are their wives and sisters, and oh, the storm in the parlor if they ever learned how many copies are locked up in dressing-table drawers!
“Here,” she said, handing the girl the pamphlets; the patient looked at it dubiously, since the title of the first one, concerning itself with population, didn’t seem to have anything to do with “not having babies.”
“This will refresh your memory after you’ve left the office,” Maya promised her. “There is so much information in these little books that no one could remember it all after one hearing. Now, this is basically what’s in those pages.”
She spent the next half hour giving the girl a detailed lecture on all of the varieties of conception prevention outlined in the famous “obscene” pamphlets, plus a couple more she herself knew about from India. At first, the girl seemed taken aback by her brutal frankness and uncompromising language, but she soon got over her shock. A time or two she shook her head as though objecting to what Maya told her—something Maya wasn’t particularly surprised at, since some of the means she had described were probably out of the girl’s hands or beyond her pocketbook. Unlikely that she would get the cooperation of her partner, for instance.
But when she finished, just as the clock struck ten, the girl looked satisfied, but still wary. “Wot’s the proice?” she asked bluntly.
“There’re two parts to the bargain. The first is to share what you’ve learned,” Maya replied, just as bluntly. “Share it with the other girls working the streets, whether they’re your friends or just the girlfriends of your man’s friends. Share it with any other woman that will listen to you, washerwomen, seamstresses, factory girls—anyone. That, or tell them they can learn the same things here or at the Fleet Street Clinic, either from me, or from a lady named Amelia Drew.”
“A’ roight,” the girl said. “Wot’s the rest?”
“Pass the word that this place isn’t to be robbed.” Maya smiled thinly at the girl’s start of surprise. “Don’t think for a moment that I didn’t know that was part of the reason you came here. Tell your friends that it’s no use. My father was in the Army; I have a pistol. He taught me how to shoot it as soon as I could hold it. I’ve killed a tiger and dozens of cobras. It would be no challenge to shoot a thief. What’s more, I’ll make a point to shoot out the legs of any intruder, then call the police to deal with them.”
The girl’s eyes kept widening. This was clearly not what she had expected.
“If I don’t happen to be here, I have two men-servants with me here who used to be Gurkhas, and they have no compunction about slitting English throats.” A lie on both counts, but one Indian looked like another to most Englishmen, and the Gurkhas had a fearsome reputation that reached even the illiterate and impoverished. Maya took a step nearer, towering over the girl. “In fact, I think they might enjoy it. Now, is that a fair bargain for what you’ve gotten tonight?”
She stuck out her hand. The girl looked at it dubiously, swallowed hard, then rubbed her own grubby palm over the equally grubby fabric of her dress and shook it solemnly. “Yes’m,” she said slowly. “Cor, but yer a ‘ard ‘un!”
“I had to be; I still have to be,” Maya replied, preferring that the girl use her own imagination to figure how Maya got to be so “hard.”
“Reckon there’s a chance Oi’ll get some kicks an’ curses from me man an’ his mates, but fair’s fair,” the girl continued, then shivered. “There’s stories about them Hindoo ‘eathen, an’ once they settle, ‘spect they’ll see it moi way. How’d ye know Oi was on the ket-chin’ lay?”
“Silk kerchief,” Maya said, and got a wince in return. “One more thing. This isn’t a charity clinic, and I don’t have to answer to anyone in a dog collar for what I do. I don’t ask if people are deserving before I treat them.”