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

respectable British doctor serving in the Army, stationed at Delhi,
and although Maya herself had obtained her degree as a physician in
the University of Delhi, her mother had not been a fellow exile. She
had been a native, a Brahmin of high caste. And although in India it
had been Surya who had wedded far beneath her state, the reverse was
true here, and Maya, as a (to put it crudely) half-breed, bore the
sign of her mother's non-English blood in her dusky complexion. All
else could be disguised with education, clothing, careful diction,
but not that. Maya's knee-length black hair had been knotted into a
pompadour and covered with a proper hat and veil, her body wrapped in
good British wool of proper tailoring, her accent trained away with
years of careful, self-imposed lessons in speech. Yet none of that
mattered very much to someone who was so fiercely determined to
consider Maya as one of the barbaric and alien "They."
It was raining again outside the hospital; it seemed to Maya that it
was always raining here. Cold wind blew the raindrops against the
glass of the office windows, and Maya was glad of the warmth of her
woolen suit coat-for she, too, was encased in the feminine version of
the uniform of the office she aspired to, plus the added burden of
corset, petticoats, and all the other wrappings deemed necessary to
"decent" dressing. Doctor Clayton-Smythe had a gas fire laid on in
his office, but he had not bothered to have it lit. Perhaps he didn't
feel the cold; after all, it was spring by the British calendar, and
the good doctor had plenty of good English fat to insulate him, seal-
like, from the cold.
He looks more like a walrus, though. I believe he probably bellows at
his wife, and means as much by it as a walrus bellowing at his little
cow.
Doctor Clayton-Smythe cleared his throat, immediately capturing her
attention. "Your results are . . . remarkable," he said cautiously.
She nodded, part modest acknowledgment, part caution on her own part.
In a way, she felt strangely calm; she had been nervous before this
battle, but now that the enemy was engaged, her mind was cool,
weighing every least inflection. Not yet time to say anything, I
think.
Now the doctor looked up, at long last, meeting her eyes for the
first time. He was a heavy man; the English staple diet of cream,
cheese, beef and bread, vegetables boiled to tastelessness, heavy
pastry, and more beef, had given him a florid complexion and jowls
that were only imperfectly hidden behind old-fashioned gray mutton-
chop whiskers and a heavy mustache, a salt - and - pepper color that
matched his hair. If he doesn't yet suffer from gout, he will, she
thought dispassionately, and his heart will not long be able to
maintain his increasing bulk. Gray hair, neatly trimmed, and rather
washed-out blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses completed the
portrait of a highly successful physician and surgeon; the head of
his hospital, and a man who could deny her not only the right to
practice here in his hospital but certification to practice medicine
in the British Isles if he chose to exert his influence. However,
Maya had chosen her adversary with care; if this man certified her,