Chapter 25 Magellan
Magellan
Mary Callahan was an angel with a temper and didn’t want Magellan getting out of bed.
Magellan had woken up to find her left arm was wrapped in a bandage from her wrist to her elbow and her right calf too.
She was wearing a chemise, and her body was thrumming in pain like the rhythm of a drumbeat.
She tried to stay immobile and focus on her breathing.
From the countdown method she ascertained she was in a small bedroom on the second floor of a tavern.
She could hear the people below and smell roasting meat.
The room was sparse with only a bed, dresser, and chair.
Soon after she woke, Mary, a buxom woman in her fifties, informed her both knife wounds had required stitches, and she’d been lucky Ned, the local doctor, was at the tavern or she might have bled to death.
“You’ve been in and out of fevers for two days,” Mary told her as she tidied the room and delivered broth and tea. “Ned wasn’t sure ya were going to make it.”
Magellan tried to sit up and winced, lying back again. “Has anyone come looking for me?”
“No, and whoever did that to ya will have to get through me first,” Mary said fiercely. “Tell me his name. I know a few fellas who’d be happy to go find him for ya.”
Magellan shuddered, the violent attack in the carriage still too vivid. Her eyes welled with tears and she blinked them back. “I don’t know. He said his name was Terrence Brighton, but it was an alias.”
“Where’s your family, lass?” Mary asked gently. “Across the sea in America?”
Magellan nodded. It was easier than explaining she had no family in 1829.
“Ya poor thing. Ya shouldn’t be alone.”
Until now she hadn’t been alone. She’d had Rhys and his family. She tried to focus on breathing and the throbbing of her wounds to keep from succumbing to despair. “Where am I?”
Mary said they were near the town of Leicester, which didn’t mean anything to her.
How far away was Rhys? Not that she could go to him. He hadn’t believed a word she’d said. She tried to mute the pain in her heart and put him out of her thoughts and instead focus on the situation at hand.
Fanny Mendelssohn was the real reason she was in 1829 and her only hope of getting home.
When she found Fanny, Magellan would be able to confirm whether Gwynedd’s instructions were real.
If Fanny had part of the ancient song Gwynedd described, then Magellan truly was on a mission inside a labyrinth of time to save the world—and she only had until Winter Solstice to find the women.
Only Garesh’s ring knew where they were.
Garesh, her beloved teacher, who knew the world’s music better than another living soul, was either a time traveler or immortal.
She didn’t know which. Had he known the journey she would have to make?
Had her parents? It made her wonder how much of her life had been engineered.
Or, if she did find Fanny Mendelssohn and the woman had no idea about the song, then Magellan would check herself into an 1829 mental institution herself and call it a day.
Because she wasn’t so far removed from reality to admit a cracked head on the floor of St. Paul’s Chapel was looking more and more like a possibility.
But until she woke up in a Manhattan hospital coma ward, she had to carry on.
“I need to get to London to see someone.”
“Do ya now?” Mary asked tartly. “Well, you’re not fit to travel yet.”
Not to mention she had no clothes. All she had was the satchel. Magellan motioned to it. “Could you hand me my bag, please?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.
Mary handed her the satchel. For a moment Magellan was afraid to look inside. Her memory of the carriage was a blur. She thought she had grabbed the diary, but she wasn’t sure.
Except there it was nestled against the cheese, bread, and apples Rhys had given her. She sagged in relief and closed her eyes.
Mary moved to the door. “Drink your broth and rest. Ned doesn’t want ya moving about for a few more days.”
Magellan pursed her lips but didn’t comment. She didn’t have a few days. Somehow she needed to regain her strength and find a way to London. But she only said, “Thank you for all your help. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“Nonsense,” Mary tsked. “Kindness to strangers is the best kindness worth giving.” She set out fresh water and a basin on the table.
“Ned will come around tonight to change your bandages. Don’t let them get wet if ya wash up.
And I would avoid the looking glass for a while. Ya have some nasty cuts and bruises.”
Magellan nodded. Her face did feel swollen.
She was sure she looked terrible. She glanced down at her hands and flexed her fingers.
At least the feeling was back, although angry welts circled her wrists, and the skin was scraped from the rope.
She lay back in bed and closed her eyes with bone-weary relief that she wasn’t dead.
The next few hours she dozed in and out of consciousness and roused herself to sip the broth.
Then she dug into the food Rhys had sent and ate a slice of cheddar cheese and crusty bread.
When evening came, the music started up again downstairs.
The same fiddlers from before were playing.
Magellan nibbled on an apple and enjoyed listening to the lively performance coming from the first floor.
Her ear could pick out two fiddlers bandying back and forth and a third musician who alternated between a guitar and a flute as the audience clapped and cheered them on. Magellan closed her eyes, feeling the music float up to her like a soothing balm.
Later, Ned “the doctor” came to visit her. He was a spindly man somewhere in his sixties and quite drunk.
“Ah! My patient is awake.” His face was flushed and his speech slurred. He began to unwrap the bandage on her arm.
Magellan offered a tentative smile, which disappeared the second she saw the stitches under the bandage. Her arm looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. Rows of coarse thread ran up the whole inside of her left arm from her wrist to her elbow, and the skin around it was inflamed.
“You’re lucky the cut wasn’t deeper, or I would have had to take the whole limb.”
Magellan recoiled at the thought of a half-drunk doctor trying to saw off her arm.
As he cleaned the stitches, she hissed with pain and watched him sloppily spread honey across it.
Her leg didn’t look much better. When he was finished changing out the bandages, he gave her a medicinal tea and told her to keep the bandages clean and apply honey regularly.
It sounded like Ned considered himself done with his services. After he left Magellan lay in bed worrying.
How was she going to get to London? What if her arm got infected and had to be amputated? What if she died?
Horrible what-ifs began crowding her brain like passengers on a train as her mind raced forward to an unknown future.
How could she find the song like this? Her body was broken.
Her mind and her heart felt broken. How could she save the world?
She was just one person. A girl. Weak and pathetic.
Not good enough. Never good enough. What could she do but fail?
She would fail. The world would be destroyed, just as she would, and her deepest fear that she would cease to exist forever would come true.
Her wounds burned like fire as her thoughts raged on alongside her fever. If Garesh were with her, he would tell her she only had to climb down the ladder of her mind back into her heart. Delirious, she could almost believe he was beside her whispering the words.
Her body racked with pain, she surrendered her fear, her self-judgment and doubt on the wings of a long breath and opened her heart. The moment she did, the music coming from downstairs so full of joy and life, burst its way in and offered her its hand.