Heidelberg Effect (26 page)

“The midwife still lives in the village,”
Greta said, stoppering the vial and frowning at Ella.

“I know.”

“She is a hopeless drunk.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“I think you must have been very good at
your job back in your own time,” Greta said with a smile.

“You know? I wasn’t, really. Just
average.”

“Maybe you needed to believe in the
job.”

Ella touched a finger to the stitches above
her eye. “Maybe I did,” she said.

Later in the middle of the night, after
Rowan had fallen into a troubled sleep, Ella went to the kitchen
for water. Greta was already there, standing by the cistern with
the dipper in her hand.

“Great minds,” Ella said, and Greta smiled
as if she understood.

“How are things with your husband?” Greta
asked as she handed Ella the dipper.

“You say that without any trace of irony at
all.” Ella said.

“You mean, because of the way you became his
wife?”

“Yeah, Greta, that’s
exactly what I mean. Being
backed
into marrying me is hardly the same as
wanting
to marry to
me.”

“Every night it sounds very much like it is
a real marriage.”

“Okay, you know I always like to encourage
even your weakest attempts at humor, Greta.”

“Forgive me,” Greta said. “But I do
understand. You want a real marriage.”

“Turns out, I do. One that has nothing to do
with convent reputations.”

“Oh, Ella, I am so happy for you!” Greta
hugged her friend tightly.

“Well, let’s don’t get ahead of things,”
Ella said. “I don’t know how Rowan feels about it.”

“You really don’t? He seems the picture of a
man in love.”

“Well, hoping and
knowing
are two
different things,” she said. “If I’ve learned anything in the last
couple months, it’s that.”

“At least you know
how
you
feel.
That’s an improvement over a few months ago, wouldn’t you
say?”

“That’s true. I know I love him. And I know
I would rather die than live without him.”

She kissed Greta on her cheek, handed her
the dipper and returned to bed with her sleeping husband.

The next night after dinner the three of
them met in Greta’s bedchamber for added privacy. Ella brought out
the wig that one of the novices had created for her. The best
seamstress in the convent, young Ava had stitched together yarn,
straw and fabric to create the illusion of a yellow cascade of
hair.

“It doesn’t look anything like hair,” Rowan
said, frowning.

“It doesn’t matter.” Ella said. “She’ll be
shitfaced when she sees it. The hair is the least of my
worries.”

“I know, darlin’,” he said. “That’s what I’m
afraid of.”

“Okay, Greta? I want to say
‘
my baby, Axel, is a
bastard
.’ Help me with the dialect
inflection.”

“Can this possibly work?” Greta asked.

“No,” Rowan said at the same time Ella said
“Yes.”

“Mein Kind, Axel, ist ein
bastard,”
Greta said.

“Mein Kind, Axel, ist ein
bastard.”
Ella put the wig on her head and
handed Rowan the cellphone. “I’m not going to stand too close,” she
said.

“Good idea,” Rowan said.

“Let’s do this thing.”

Greta watched Rowan with fascination as he
videotaped Ella’s performance. “It is a miniature movie camera?”
she asked. “And everyone owns this in your time?”

“Pretty much,” Rowan said. He showed her the
screen with Ella in playback. “I gotta admit, babe,” he said to
Ella. “It looks good.”

“Okay,” Ella said. She grabbed the camera.
“Now for the set up. You ready, Greta?”

“I would not miss this for the world,” Greta
said with a grin.

It all came down even
easier than Ella could have planned it. Greta told the midwife that
Ella could not speak because of a vow of silence. So Ella smiled
and poured drinks for over an hour in the nearby
gasthaus
while Greta
listened to what appeared to Ella to be a long list of complaints
and general whining. Although barely fifty, the midwife looked more
like eighty. Hunchbacked with fingers twisted with arthritis, her
withered face told the story of a long career of helping to bring
life into the world and, just as often, watching that life expire.
Ella found herself feeling sorry for her and prayed that what they
were doing would not get the old woman tortured or
killed.

Ella was eager to show the midwife the video
but she let Greta be the one to determine the timing. The woman
needed to be drunk enough to remember what she saw but not exactly
how she saw it. Too drunk and she’d pass out before they could play
the video or not remember having seen it. Not drunk enough and she
would think the cellphone was witchcraft.

Ella thought Greta was masterly. She spoke
to the woman with great kindness and commiseration. She feigned
drinking with her to appear companionable. When Ella heard Greta
say the words “Krüger” and “Helga,” she knew they were getting
close. Smoothly, with one hand on the midwife to restrain her
should she decide to bolt, Greta leaned over and tapped Ella on the
knee. Ella brought out the cellphone already powered on, placed it
at eye level to the old woman, and pressed the play button.

Her reaction was unexpected. At first she
watched the video as if she had been watching movies all her life.
For a moment, Ella thought they might need to play it again. But
before she could decide, the woman started to shriek. Ella quickly
tucked the phone in her habit and melted into the shadows of the
public bar. She watched Greta soothe the woman and work to put
words and thoughts into her head.

Ella’s own head ached. It had been a long
day of mucking out stalls and dodging kicks from the horses and the
stable boys. A wave of exhaustion washed over her. She hoped Greta
could finish so they could return to the convent soon, since she
had to leave early in the morning to return to the castle. Every
hour of sleep and Rowan’s gentle ministrations were precious to
her. Finally, Greta looked over and faintly smiled. The bait was
planted. Now they just needed to spring the trap.

Chapter Sixteen

It is a truth universal to plumbers as well
as spies that the best laid plans always go wrong at the worst
possible time. In Ella’s experience, this rang true if seven
dollars of PVC piping or the lives of two hundred innocent people
were at risk. No one could have predicted the event which led to
the coming disaster. Who would have thought a little thing like
walking down the street to put the goats in the lower pasture would
derail everything?

As Ella was to realize painfully later, it
wasn’t the novices walking with the goats that were the problem. It
was that they had Rowan as their protector—a role that Deputy
Marshal Rowan Pierce took very seriously.

The night before all their plans began to
unravel, Rowan and Ella met away from the ears and eyes of the
convent in Greta’s chamber. Greta had heard a disturbing rumor that
she needed to share with them. While she trusted every woman in the
nunnery with her life, she would not take the chance of paying for
that trust with the lives of her two American friends.

“This is the last of it, I’m afraid,” she
said, handing each of them a glass of brandy.

“Probably just as well,” Rowan said. “Clear
heads are needed in the days ahead.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you
about,” Greta said, pulling on the corded belt of her habit in a
gesture of unease that Ella had never seen her do before. “We may
not have days.”

Rowan downed the brandy in one swallow and
placed the glass on the tray at Greta’s bedside.

“What have you heard?” he asked.

“There is talk that it was a warlock living
in Heidelberg who saved the boy from the executioner’s axe a few
weeks ago.”

“Oh, shit,” Ella said, holding her own
brandy without drinking. “I was hoping they’d forget all about
that.” She looked at Rowan. “My first day here, I interfered with a
public execution.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. “How’d you hear
about this, Greta?”

“One of the novices delivers bread to the
pub and heard people talking.”

“It’s already a full week past the time Axel
said he’d come,” Rowan said. “But the way I see it, we can do this
thing all the way or half-assed. They’re not onto to us yet. I say
we keep with the plan.”

The next morning, Ella left
the convent at just before daybreak. In their effort to come up
with a plan that might help them extract
something
usable from the castle,
she, Greta and Rowan had gotten little sleep the night before. As
it happened, Ella left the convent with a solid plan for hurrying
things along. Problem was, it wasn’t the plan she had agreed on
with Greta and Rowan.
That
plan involved Ella spending the night in the
stables and Rowan setting a fire in the main courtyard inside the
front gate of the castle at midnight. She was to use the diversion
as an opportunity to sneak into the castle interior one last time
and look for anything they could use to discredit the
Krügers.

Normally, Ella would have
argued with Rowan that it was too dangerous for him to be so close
to the castle. The guards were vigilant and killed intruders on
sight—no questions asked. But because she planned on sneaking into
Krüger’s private chamber
this
morning
and being home
by lunchtime, she had agreed to Rowan’s plan. She would explain to
him later that she knew the fire idea was too dangerous and she
didn’t have the time or energy to make him see it. She knew he
would be furious with her. But then, if she managed to get the
information they needed, he would also forgive her pretty quickly,
too. At least, she hoped so.

Rowan watched Ella walk
down the lane toward the castle. The next time he held her in his
arms, he thought, the hardest part would be over. She will have
survived her last workday from hell. He will have evaded capture at
setting the fire. Ella will have discovered
something
they could work with and,
God willing, escaped back to the safety of the convent. A sick
feeling began to grow in the pit of his stomach and he fought to
ignore it.
That was a whole lot of bullets
to dodge,
he thought, as he watched her
dark cropped hair and jacket of rags disappear at the end of the
lane. He stared after her for a few seconds before turning to the
two young novices waiting patiently next to him.

Would either of them get out of the
seventeenth century alive?

The smell of five goats the novices were
leading assailed his nostrils as he walked beside them. Greta had
said that the girls had taken the goats to the far pasture many
times before and did not need an escort. But he could tell she was
relieved when he insisted upon going with them. The tragedy of the
two nuns assaulted just the week before was still fresh in
everyone’s minds.

As Rowan looked at the two girls, dressed in
chin to toe black habits that swept the dirt from the cobblestones
as they moved, he wondered if they felt any safer with him along.
It seemed to him that they feared all men. Perhaps in 1620 they had
good reason for that fear. Greta had told him that many of the
novices had fled the unnatural attentions of their male relatives
or had been sold to the order by their fathers. Although now broke,
there was a time when the convent had funds to rescue these girls.
However, there had not been a new recruit to the little order in
nearly four years. The word in town was out: it was no longer safe
to be a nun in Heidelberg.

Rowan was sure that the two novice
goatherders could not be more than fourteen years old. They walked
silently behind the goats and kids with downcast eyes, counting,
presumably, on the homing instincts of the goats to get themselves
to the pasture. Rowan walked well behind them, both for their
comfort and for his need to spot danger before it was upon them. He
wore his gardener’s rags but had wrapped his cowboy boots in felt
and leather so that he could walk down the street in comfort while
still looking like a seventeenth century peasant.

As he looked around at the ancient
storefronts and alehouses, he had trouble processing the fact that
he was in a different time. While he wasn’t very familiar with
Heidelberg, he had been in town long enough to notice it seemed to
display fewer signs of modern life than most cities. In his few
days there, he had seen no Pizza Huts, Starbucks or chain grocery
stores. He took a moment to imagine that the street he was walking
down this morning was actually in 2012.

It was, of course, the moment Axel’s gang
chose to attack.

Because he was one hundred feet behind the
novices, even daydreaming, he saw the men in time. Unaware that the
girls were not alone, the three men on horseback never bothered to
look around before they rode in and scattered the goats into the
adjoining alley. One of the girls had the spirit to poke her crook
at the closest rider to her. It looked to Rowan like she was
attempting to keep the man at a distance, but the rider grabbed the
cane and dragged the girl to him, slashing at her hands with a
short handled knife. Then, laughing loudly, he reached down and
pulled her across his saddle. He was in the process of turning to
crow to his companions when the bullet hole sprouted from the
center of his forehead.

Rowan stepped closer to the melee, his arm
straight and his Glock pointed at the next rider. The girl across
the dead man’s saddle fell to the ground and scrambled to her feet.
Rowan could see her hands were covered with blood. Spotting Rowan,
one of the other men pulled his sword and idiotically charged him.
Rowan dispatched him with a bullet to the chest. In his mind he
could hear the girls screaming and the sounds of horses’ hooves
against cobblestone. As he turned his gun onto the fleeing and
final assailant, he hesitated to shoot him. There were probably
enough eyewitnesses at this point to make it irrelevant if the man
lived to give a report of the attack. Rowan looked down at the
unharmed girl at his side, who was now staring not at the man who
had tried to abduct her, but at Rowan. He steadied his Glock and
shot the retreating rider in the back, then watched him drop from
his horse to the hard street.