A Trespass in Time (10 page)

            “It’s a crescent moon, you see,” Axel said, holding up her bloodied arm so she might see his handiwork. “I will return for you and the others when the moon is no longer full.”

            She returned his gaze but said nothing. She watched him give the signal to his men to mount up and they let her drop silently to her knees on the rough stones of the alley, her arm bleeding freely down the front of her dress. She watched Axel mount his horse. She looked at the whimpering novice who was held in front of one rider. The man holding the novice had one hand on the reins of his horse and the other clutching the girl’s breast through her habit. The girl looked at Greta with terror and pleading in her eyes before her horse turned down the road toward the castle.

            Greta sat in the cold alley, pressing her arm to her chest to staunch the blood. She looked in the direction they had gone. She bowed her head to blot out the sounds of the child’s sobs until she realized they were her own.

            Ella’s eyes opened slowly to focus on the beautiful nun who sat beside her bed. The smile on her face was so perfect, so loving, that Ella had to resist the urge to reach out to her. Slowly, she pulled herself to a sitting position and positioned the thin rough woolen blanket around her shoulders. She was in a cell-like room but the heavy wooden door across from the bed had no lock on it. On the table next to her was her cellphone, her Taser, her billfold full of Euros, and a pack of matches from a club in the
Altstadt
she and Heidi had visited last month.

            Ella’s mouth felt dry. She had no immediate memory of how she came to be out of the storm and in this bed. The woman by her bed wore the black habit of a nun, the wimple framing a beautiful face with large expressive eyes.

            “Does your head hurt? Can you see me?”

            Ella stared at her.

            “Are you feeling ill? Or just weary?” The woman handed Ella a cup of water.

            Ella drank from the cup quickly and handed it back. “More, please.”

            “Of course.” The nun spoke abruptly over her shoulder in a language Ella didn’t recognize. A young woman who had been standing in the hall answered her.  

            “Where am I?”  
Had she made it to the church after all?

            “You are at the
Kloster St. Josef
,” the woman said. “We are the Order of the Visitation of Mary.” She was smiling but Ella felt her eyes examining her intently.

            “How did I…?”

            “You were found collapsed at the foot of the north gate of the convent garden. The storm was very bad. Because of your strange clothes, you were mistaken for a lad. Upon closer inspection, it was deduced that you were a foreign novice of some kind and so were brought to me.”

            “My clothes?” She had been wearing jeans and a leather jacket. She looked around the room but saw no signs of them.

            “They are drying but you will have no need of them while you are with us.”

            Ella couldn’t tell if the nun was trustworthy or not. Her head hurt and the cloud of confusion still hung in her mind.

            “Can you tell me what is the date?” Ella asked.

            “So you are taking little steps to the truth. It was the same with me. My name is Greta Schaefer and I am the Mother Superior of this convent.”

            The young woman returned with a pitcher of water which she placed on the nightstand and left the room. The nun poured water into Ella’s cup.

            “It is the sixth day of October,” Greta said, as she handed the cup to Ella. “In the year of our gracious Lord, 1620.”

            Ella’s hand froze as she reached for the cup and she stared blankly at Greta. The expression on Ella’s face spoke louder than any words could:
How is that possible?

            “It is a lot to understand,” Greta said. “I know from your clothes and from where you were found, that you are not from this time.”

            Ella put a hand to her head and looked around the room as if trying to see if there was anything in the room or about the nun that might conceivably disprove the idea.
Zippers? Bifocals? A bedside clock? Sounds of traffic? Anything?
  “But, how…is that possible?” she said.

            “I know you have many questions,” Greta said. “I recognized immediately that you and I are alike. You understand what I am telling you?”  Greta reached over and touched Ella’s hand but Ella withdrew it immediately.

            “Forgive me,” Greta said. “You have slept for many hours and it is so hard to be patient. I have many questions, too,” she said. “I, myself, came here from the year 1946. Are you from anywhere near that time?”

            Ella watched her for any sign of guile, but the nun merely smiled patiently, her eyes bright and eager.

            “2012,” Ella said finally.

            “Oh!” Greta put her hand to her mouth as if she’d been goosed. “Such a long way into the future. So much must have happened.”

            “I’m sorry, Sister,” Ella said, forming her words carefully in order to be understood. “Can you tell me how it is possible that you…that you came to be here from…you said 1946? Are we in some kind of time bubble?”

            Greta smiled and shook her head. “I am sure I must have sounded as confused and mad to everyone as you do to me now,” she said.  “When you have slept again and eaten, I will tell you my story and then, perhaps, you will tell me yours. Meanwhile, it is sufficient that God has sent you to help us and for that I am grateful but not surprised. That is well for now. Rest. We will talk later.”

            Ella could not keep her eyes open. It occurred to her that it didn’t really matter to her where she was or even
when
she was. She was safe and dry from the storm. And for now that was enough. As she drifted off to sleep, she felt a cool hand gently smooth her brow. 

            Rowan sat in his apartment, his cellphone on his knee, staring at the wall. In the noisy bar earlier that evening, he hadn’t heard his cellphone go off and had missed the call from Ella. He lifted the bottle of beer to his lips and glanced at the cellphone screen. He had listened to her voicemail ten times already. It wasn’t likely to get any less cryptic.   He hit the play button again anyway.

            “Hey, Rowan. Surprise. It’s me. Look, I was just wondering what you were up to. I mean, we haven’t talked in awhile. When you get this message...please call me back…And if you’re screening this call because you’ve got some Alabama hottie on tap there, that’s cool. Except I thought US Marshals have to be available at all times. What if I were a Federal witness needing a ride somewhere? Not to get all dramatic here but I kind of need you, Rowan. Anyway. Okay, you know this is me, Ella, right?”

            Rowan stared at the cell time. Five p.m. Dothan time. Ten p.m. in Heidelberg. What the hell was she doing calling him at ten at night? He had called her cellphone and her landline with no answer. One just rang and the other went straight to voicemail. Tomorrow he planned to call her father to see if he knew anything. And maybe he’d call her supervisor to see what was going on there. None of this felt right. Not being able to reach her felt worst of all. Rowan drained his beer and tossed the bottle toward the kitchen garbage can. He missed.

           
“I kind of need you, Rowan.”

            When Ella woke up, Greta was again at her bedside. Without preamble, the nun handed her a steaming cup of tea and began speaking.

            “My name is Greta Schaefer,” she said. “I taught English before the war and worked in a munitions factory in Manheim during the war until it was bombed.”  

            “Your English is really good,” Ella said. As she sipped from the strange dark tea. She realized she was wearing a rough cotton shift she didn’t remember putting on.  She felt safe with this nun and in this place. She trusted Greta. She wasn’t sure if that was wise but it felt inevitable.

            “The war had just ended,” Greta said. “I was living with my mother in Heidelberg until things could be resolved after the war.”

            “’Resolved’?”  

            “I had a husband in the war,” she said. “I had not heard from him for a year. We all believed he had been killed, but I was waiting with my family to see if he would come home.”

            “Oh. Sorry,” Ella said.

            “Heidelberg was not damaged in the war. Did you know that?”

            Ella shook her head.

            “Although we didn’t think the Americans cared for such things, it was widely believed that they were so enthralled with Heidelberg’s beauty that they could not bear to destroy it. One day, I was coming home from late mass from the Catholic Church of the Jesuits. It began to rain, much like the storm we had last night. The heavens opened wide, the night sky was illuminated with terrible bolts of lightning. I tried to hurry. Stupidly, I had left my umbrella at home. My mother warned me to take it.”  

            Ella held the hot tea and blew gently across the surface. And waited.

            “I fell.” Greta said. “It was a shortcut and the stones were slippery. Very near where you were found.”

            “How did it happen?”  

            “I do not know. One minute I was rubbing a skinned knee in the dark in 1946 Heidelberg, thinking of my dinner waiting for me at my mother’s and the next minute I was here.”  

            A wave of urgency suddenly came over Ella as she found herself blurting out what she soon realized was, up to this moment in her life, the most important question of her life: “Is it possible to go back?” she asked.

            “Back to your own time? I believe so. Once, when I was bringing the lambs in during a bad rain, I found myself very near that same spot at the base of the garden lane. I felt a terrible pulling in my soul. It was an almost irresistible urge that convinced me that if I were to just let it happen, I would return to my own time after the war.”

            “Why didn’t you?”

            “I found a better life here.”

            “Were you a nun in 1946?”

            “I was not. I am not proud of that part of the story,” Greta said. “But I believe I have made amends to God in the way that matters.” She looked at Ella and smiled. “In all the ways that matter. And so that part of the story will wait for another time. You are tired. Rest now and we will talk more later.”

            Several hours later, after a long hot bath in an ancient wooden tub, a convent novice showed Ella to a different cell and gave her a simple habit of crudely dyed linen and a pair of slippers. There was a missile and a single candle on the nightstand, a small window looking out over the garden below, and a thin wool rug on the slate floor.

            The bed linen—a far cry from the three hundred thread count sheets she had at home—was clean, soft and comfortable. Seconds after her head hit the pillow that night and just before she fell asleep, it occurred to Ella that for the first time in a very long time, she felt content and safe.

            The next day, Ella spent the first full day of her life in 1620 Heidelberg following Greta around the convent. She was reminded that this mysterious woman who had rescued her from the storm was the Mother Superior. It was not clear how that happened, since Greta readily admitted she had no formal religious training to be even a religious novice, let alone a nun, she still had not revealed to Ella and didn’t appear in any hurry to do so.

         For great parts of that first day—despite much evidence to the contrary—and into the second, Ella didn’t completely believe that she was living in a different time. She found it difficult to grasp the possibility, much less the reality, of it all.  But by the end of her second day of life in 1620, she would never again have the security of that doubt.

Chapter Seven

            “You are English, yes?”

            “American.”

            “Ah, yes. The Allies.”

            Ella and Greta were setting out dishes for a simple meal of soup and fresh bread in Greta’s private chamber. Ella was impressed with the fact that, here, everybody worked, even the Mother Superior, who seemed to work harder than everyone else. The other nuns moved silently about the small convent performing their chores of cleaning, scrubbing, cooking, and tending the little garden. Ella often saw their lips moving in silent prayer. She had made eye contact only once with a fourteen year old girl, who smiled shyly at Ella and then looked away.

            “Mother Superior?” Ella said. “I understand that history stopped for you right after the war but I need you not to see me that way.”

            “As the victor, you mean?”

            “Yes, that’s right. Germany and America are friends now.
Good
friends.”

            “I cannot believe that is possible.”

            “Well, it’s true. Heck, we’re pals with Japan, too. I did part of my sophomore year at the University of Freiburg and half my friends have travelled the length and breadth of Germany.”

            “There…there were no reprisals?”

            “There was a trial…”

            “The Nuremberg Trials. I know.”

            “Then you know a lot of the head honcho SS guys were executed.”

            “But
Germany
was not punished?”

            “In a way they were, I guess, but not by us. My Dad used to say that history is its own punishment.”

            The woman frowned at Ella as if unsatisfied with that answer.

            “Well,” Ella said, seating herself at the rough wooden table in Greta’s room. “As part of the surrender agreement, the Allies forbade your country from having an army of any size. Which meant that during the next fifty years,” Ella continued, “without the expense of an army draining all their resources, Germany became an economic powerhouse. With the help of the Allies—Britain included—they rebuilt their country in a decade of the war while France was still planting daylilies in their bunkers. They lead the world in technology and engineering and their cities and infrastructure reflect that.”