"Mercedes Lackey - EM 3 - The Serpents Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

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for Mike Gilbert we'll miss you


Dear readers, One of the joys of writing historical fantasy is the
occasion to use existing quotes or references to actual events.
However, as a fantasy writer I reserve the right to bend history as
well as create magic. So as you read, if you happen to come across a
cited event or quotation which seems inaccurate to the period, please
humor me, and remember that the world of this book is not our world,
but a place which exits only in my imagination.
Mercedes R. Lackey
LEADEN, self-important silence isolated the chief surgeon's office
from the clamor of the hospital and the clangor of the street
outside. A rain-dark day, a dim, chill room filled with cold, heavy,
imposing mahogany office furniture and lined with ebony bookshelves
containing dreary brown leather-bound volumes so perfectly arranged
that it was not possible that any of them had ever been taken down
and used-the room in which Maya found herself was designed to cow,
confine, and intimidate. But Maya Witherspoon, though depressed by an
atmosphere so alien to her native India, had spent most of her life
perfecting the art of keeping a serene and unreadable expression on
her face. All that practice stood her in good stead now.
Across from her, enthroned behind his mahogany desk of continental
proportions, sat Doctor Octavian Clayton-Smythe, Chief Medical
Officer of St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, in the rattling heart of
London.
One of Kipling's "little tin gods," she thought irreverently,
clasping her ice-cold, black-gloved hands tightly on top of the
handbag in her lap. He would fit in quite perfectly in the Colonial
Service. Stiffly propped up in his armor of utter respectability ...
sure of his importance, so intent on forcing others to acknowledge
it.
Cocooned in the somber black woolen suit of the medical profession,
as if he sat in mourning for all the patients he had managed to kill,
he frowned down at the results of her various academic examinations-
results that should leave no doubt in the mind of any sensible person
that she was fitter to be granted the sacred title of "Doctor of
Medicine and Surgery" than a good many of the young men who would
have that very accolade bestowed on them in the course of this year
of Our Lord, 1909. In point of fact, she already had that title-in
her homeland of India. This, however, was not India; it was London,
England, the heart of the British Empire and of civilization as the
English knew it. And as such, there were two distinct handicaps to
her ambition that Maya labored beneath at this moment. The first was
her sex. Although female doctors were not unknown here, there were no
more than three hundred in the British Isles, and most probably the
actual number was less than that.
The second was that although Maya's father had been a perfectly