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everyone living here, making everyone a little more inclined to forgive and sweetening tempers.
    Now her last, and easiest, work of the evening. She returned to the conservatory and spent a little time on each and every plant, strengthening it, encouraging it to grow at a rate much faster than “normal,” and giving it the extra energy to do so. Once the trees, plants, and bushes were tall and strong enough to suit her, vigorous enough to cover the walls and give her the complete illusion of a tiny jungle, she would let them grow at their own pace. Until that time, she would use her own strength to build her sanctuary, the sanctuary she needed so desperately in this alien place.
    It wearied her; it always did. When she was done, Nisha called her softly. She hooted at the owl comfortingly and blew out the candle-lamps as she left, so that the conservatory descended into the sweet, warm darkness her pets all loved.
    She closed herself in her office to study, with the murmur of voices within the house and the sounds of wheels on cobblestones outside as a soothing counterpart to her reading. Her father had never scrimped on medical texts and journals, and neither would she. There was so much to learn! It seemed that not a week passed but that some new medical discovery was heralded. Some were nonsense, of course; she had an advantage over her colleagues in that she could tell if a treatment for an illness or injury was actually doing any good. X-ray photography was a boon, if one could keep the patient still enough—but electrical stimulation was stuff and nonsense. She could tell easily enough with her own special senses that the patient got no more benefit from it than from any other nostrum in which he truly believed. Belief was a powerful medicine, ofttimes more powerful than any pill or potion she could offer.
    As for sanitary surgery, she already felt that simply boiling instruments before surgery was nowhere near enough. Although she had had no say in the matter when she operated or assisted under the supervision of one of Royal Free’s senior surgeons, from now on she would have a nurse spritzing the patient and the hands of those operating on him with dilute carbolic acid during her surgeries. Dr. Lister was right, and he would save many, many lives with his ideas, if he could get other physicians to implement them.
    Tonight she studied gas gangrene. It was not the sort of literature that anyone but a small percentage of people on this island would even consider for after-dinner reading, and only a minuscule number of those would think it suitable under any conditions for a woman. Maya didn’t care; she wanted to see if there was any hint in the current papers that her carbolic-acid atomizer would prevent the spread of this fearful condition. By the time she finished for the evening, with the clock on the mantle over the unused fire striking eleven, she had come to the conclusion that it would help, but no more. If only there were thin, flexible gloves available, impermeable to those tiny creatures Louis Pasteur had discovered as the root cause of infection and disease! Then a surgeon could operate without fear that the dread bacteria would enter some tiny nick or cut on her hands!
    But India rubber was too thick and became sticky when warm, lambskin and eelskin little better than bare hands, for they required seams and, once used, could not be used again. Washing, with soap and carbolic, before and after, thoroughly and exhaustively: that was the only preventative, and that a shallow one. But she could not let fear keep her from trying to save lives.
    She rubbed her eyes and shut the cover of the latest issue of The Lancet, marveling that there were still so many men who dared to call themselves doctors who refused to believe that bacteria caused infection.
    How could they not? In the face of all the evidence? She had never had a doubt, and never would have had, even without the evidence of her own