Swept Away (9 page)

A
s Ella punched
down a large disk of grainy dough and kneaded it with her fists, she had to admit that the execution yesterday had put a serious damper on her curiosity about exploring 1620 Heidelberg. She didn't blame Greta for not trusting her now to act appropriately. Hell, Ella didn't trust herself. And the last thing she wanted to do was endanger the nunnery. They had enough troubles.

When she went to bed that night, Ella was more exhausted than she could ever remember. Surprised that a quiet day spent baking bread and cleaning a kitchen could tire her so, she went to bed before dinner and slept deeply. When she awoke, she was sure she had dreamt about her mother. She began her day of baking and cleaning full of good spirits and peace.

The days turned into weeks as Ella fell into a natural rhythm in the convent. Surrounded by female company—something she had never experienced as an only and motherless child—she discovered a love for the sound of women's voices and laughter. She spoke rudimentary German to the young novices and even developed a way of communicating with them that included teasing and personal jokes. When one girl went to bed with menstrual cramps, Ella brought her tea and massaged her shoulders. Ella often spoke to the other nuns in English since they had trouble understanding her German anyway. She found it relaxing to speak in English and the fact that she was not understood was also, strangely, comforting to her.

Dinner times were usually silent, but Ella looked forward to her evenings with the Mother Superior. They would retire to Greta's room for a glass of wine and talk about things from the future.

“I found out some bad news,” Ella told Greta one night. “Just before I popped over to the 1600's.”

Greta frowned as they relaxed on her bed and sipped the sweet wine occasionally delivered from the monastery in Worms. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It's a long story but basically, I found out that my mother never wanted me. It's why I was out in the storm at night. First, I discovered that I am related to a Nazi war criminal, which is bad enough, but because of that, my mother never wanted children. When she got pregnant, it was my father who insisted she have the baby. Me.” Ella took a long ragged breath. “She was so sure I'd carry the bad blood.”

Greta moved a lock of hair from Ella's eyes and rested her hand on her friend's shoulder. “I'm no geneticist,” she said, “but I don't think it works like that.”

“It's not even that so much,” Ella said. “It's really the final knowledge of how unwanted I was. Although in my heart, I knew it.” She touched her necklace. “I always knew it.”

“You need to forgive her, Ella.”

“She's beyond that.”

“Yes, but you aren't.”

Ella looked at her.

“Life is hard enough,” Greta said, “without carrying the burdens of our parents.”

Ella smiled and took a sip of her wine. “You are so wise, Mother Superior.”

“You are teasing me.”

“Yes, but that doesn't make you any less wise.” Ella stood up and walked to the window, thrusting thoughts of her mother aside. “How much time do we have left before the moon wanes?” she asked,

“I thought you might have forgotten about that.”

“How could I forget?” Ella asked. “I'm reminded every time you pull up your sleeve to wash the dishes or dig in the garden. How much time do we have?”

“Not much,” Greta admitted. “Axel is a man of his word.”

“That's one way to put it,” Ella said, frowning. “A week, two?”

“Why? Is there anything we can do to stop him?”

“Was your plan to just sit tight until he came?”

Greta looked at her sadly. “My plan is to have you leave before he comes. You must go back to your own time. You will be safe there.”

“You could come with me.”

“I cannot leave the nunnery.”

“Then we'll need a plan,” Ella said. “We need to meet this bastard head on, which means we do not just wait for him to show up and herd us all into white slavery or whatever. Running away is not in my DNA.”

“I will miss the way you speak.”

“We need a plan, Greta.”

Greta sighed heavily. “How can a plan, however brilliantly it may be conceived, work to topple a power that rules all of Heidelberg? You saw for yourself that the laws of the city are powerless against the Krügers. It is hopeless, Ella.”

“That, Greta, is bullshit,” Ella said. “I don't do hopeless and I don't let my friends do hopeless. I don't know how yet or in what way we're going to tackle this mess but I do know we're not going to just sit here and wait for it to happen.”

H
ans Krüger held
the object in his hands but his eyes were not focused on any one thing in the room. He sat at his massive hand-carved desk and listened again to his first lieutenant, Mayer, give testimony about the aborted execution.

“So the mob decreed that the boy was not guilty?” His lips curled in an involuntary sneer when he spoke. Following the advice from his long dead father, he long ago promised himself that he would never look his servants full in the eye unless he was slaying them. While he felt he owed no man anything, the justness of that pact upon taking a life appealed to him.

“They took the axman's fit as evidence that God wanted the boy to live,” Mayer said.

Krüger glanced down at the barbed dart in his hand. Neither he nor any of his men had ever seen anything like it. He touched a calloused finger to one of the sharp points of the missile that had penetrated the axman's flesh. The executioner, who boasted that he had not a scratch on him save the small puncture on his chest, insisted that the object had attacked his internal organs with great bolts of lightning. To confirm this, Krüger had ordered him cut open by the castle surgeons. The results revealed no signs of scorched or damaged organs. And now Krüger would need to find a new executioner.

He tossed the missile down on his desk where it landed with a harmless clank.

“This is not heaven-sent,” he said. “A man made this. A devilishly devious mind, but a man.”

“Yes, lord. Shall we arrest the boy again?”

Krüger made a face. He had no wish to agitate the crowd. Neither did he want them to make a habit of over-riding his judgments on the guilty.

“We gain little by killing the child. Where were my officers presiding over the execution?”

“You…you mean, besides the executioner, himself? I do not know, lord.”

“Find them,” Krüger said. “They are the ones who must be punished. They are the ones that allowed the mob to save the child.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And Mayer?”

“Yes, lord?”

“The man who threw this missile into the chest of the axman was in the crowd that day. It is an unusual thing, this…projectile. Perhaps even an instrument of the Devil. Send your spies out to find what other odd things have been heard or seen in Heidelberg lately. Search everywhere. Find this man.”

“Yes, lord,” Mayer said meekly. He bowed and turned to leave. When he opened the door, a handsome young man of twenty walked through and into the salon. Dressed in velvets and gilded linens, the man's face strongly resembled Krüger's own. Many had commented on the remarkable likeness.

“Father?” the young man said, entering and standing in front of Krüger's desk. “I would have a word.”

Krüger never relaxed the grimace on his face but he waved away his other counselors, who scurried from the room.

“I am busy, Christof,” he said, picking up the barbed slug and rolling it over in his hand.

“I've come to ask you again, Father, to reconsider the toll on the Brücke Bridge.”

“Not this again,” Krüger said with disgust.

“Father, the villagers who live across the Nekker are starving because they cannot bring their wares to the marketplace to sell.”

“They should pay the toll then.”

“They are poor, Father,” Christof said, his voice reedy and halting. “They are starving, separated from a chance to live without poverty, by an uncrossable bridge—”

“Enough!” his father roared. “Come to me once more with this mewling petition of yours and I will throw ten peasants into the Nekker. Do you hear me?”

His face red, Christof bowed to his father.

“One hundred peasants! A village of filthy peasants!
That
will put an end to their poverty!”

As Christof fled from the room, he knocked into his older brother, Axel, in the doorway.

“Watch where you go, worm!” his brother snarled at him. “The touch of you sickens me!” He gave Christof a push that set him stumbling out the door. Christof fell hard on the stone threshold and caught himself with outstretched arms. As the heavy door slammed behind him, Christof could hear his brother and father laughing heartily together.

A
fter a week on the road
, even the dead
rudbeckia
in the front porch planter was a welcome sight. Rowan tossed his car keys in a dish on the front hall table. He listened to the silence of his apartment for a moment. He still couldn't help monitoring his tactical surrounding before relaxing. For the last three weeks, he'd done little else, twenty-four seven. Now he went to the refrigerator and took out a beer. As important as Rowan firmly believed it to be, there had to be few things more boring than providing witness security—until the moment it turned so nonboring that it killed you.

It had been the worst possible assignment at the worst possible time. Witness security was dull but required vigilance. Rowan figured it was just about the hardest part of his job: trying to keep his mind from wandering when, on the face of it, there looked to be nothing going on. Spending seven days watching and waiting in order to keep his witness secure until the man could testify gave Rowan's mind all the time in the world to wonder what was going on with Ella.

He took a drink of his beer.

Thank God the divided attention hadn't added up to a dead witness.

He flipped through the first-class mail but nothing was interesting enough to require a more in-depth inspection. He went to the kitchen and pulled out a frozen dinner, peeled off the cardboard lid and slid it in the microwave. He stood in front of the oven, drinking his beer and watching the oven interior rotate. He turned and looked in the direction of the living room where the television set was on. A wave of depression washed over him.

The phone call to Ella's office had revealed that she had given notice the same day she called him. Something had happened that made her quit and reach out to him for help.

Not to get all dramatic here but I need you, Rowan
.

He opened the door off the kitchen that led to the narrow balcony and took a deep breath. The microwave finished cooking with a loud bell but he made no move to open it.

He had talked with the Heidelberg police and given them Ella's father's contact number. He had asked them to start a missing person's search and to check out her apartment. He hated doing all this from this distance—and along with that bat shit crazy old man of hers—but when the report came back it confirmed there was no one in the apartment and no sign of foul play.

That sick feeling in his gut that he'd been nursing for the last three weeks was getting worse by the minute and all the beer and mind numbing work or mental calisthenics wasn't helping a damn.

Shit, Ella, where are you? And what the hell am I supposed to do about it?

A
s Greta lifted
the heavy water bucket, she could hear that men were coming. A ribbon of fear needled into her heart and she dropped the bucket with a thud, narrowly missing her foot.

It was too soon!
She turned toward the convent and gauged how long it would take her to get back and warn the others. She made a fast calculation. Everyone was in the convent, either working or praying. Axel would gather them all up in one swoop.

“
Oberschwester
!” The voice was high but definitely male.
Mother Superior!

Greta's knees weakened and she let out a huge breath. She turned to face the nobleman and his two knights as they entered the small convent courtyard. The nobleman's boots were polished leather. His short jacket was a rich forest green of boiled wool. He smiled when he saw Greta, quickly dismounted and walked toward her.

“Christof,” she said, holding out her hand to him.

He grabbed her hand and hesitated, as if trying to decide whether or not to bring it to his lips. In the end, he just squeezed it and returned it to her.

“Greta,” he said. “I feared I would not find you well.”

“Your brother…”

“I know, I know. My shame grows with the knowledge of his crimes.”

Greta rubbed her hand against her rough woolen habit. Christof's face was pale and his hair a very light blond. He looked nothing like his dark haired brother. Greta always felt this was an extra point in Christof's favor.

“The novice he took,” Greta said. “Have you seen her?”

“I am sorry,
Oberschwester
,” Christof said, shaking his head. “I have seen nothing.”

And prefer it that way?
Greta couldn't help but think.

“She is just a child, my lord,” she said. “Not even fifteen.”

She could see she was making him uncomfortable. She wondered if he knew how uncomfortable the young girl was being made.

“Greta,” he said, holding a hand up. “I can do nothing about that. I am here to warn you that Axel talks of little else but the destruction of your convent.”

Greta forced herself to smile. This was not news to her. She had this news carved on her arm and in her heart. Yet, Christof felt he was helping. Clearly, he wanted to be helping.

He took her hand and held it to his chest.