Heidelberg Effect (12 page)

Chapter Eight

“Ella, stop!” Greta said. She looked around
in desperation, fearful they were attracting attention. The mob,
however, was focused on the upcoming execution of the child—a
rarity even in the Middle Ages. They cheered the executioner as he
hefted his axe and playfully swung it into the air. Ella was close
enough now to see that one of the women at the foot of the stage
was young enough—and hysterical enough—to be the boy’s mother. Her
screams were drowned out by the crowd, her face a contortion of
indescribable agony as her worst nightmare was being enacted before
her in living, brutal color.

Greta reached her seconds before Ella pulled
her shotgun Taser out of the pocket of her habit.

“Hide it in your sleeve,” Greta said
hoarsely, not missing a beat. She ripped the rosary from her own
throat, her eyes darting to the people who surrounded them, and
held it in both hands as if it were a weapon. All eyes were on the
two figures on stage. No one was interested in the actions of a
couple of nuns in the crowd.

Ella lifted her arm toward the headsman. The
long sleeve of her habit hid the Taser as she pointed it at him.
Her finger twitched on the trigger as she watched him grab the boy
by the scruff of the neck and throw him down at the front of the
stage. She waited, blocking out the noise from the crowd, the
bleating misery of the child’s mother beside her and the pounding
of her own heart. Sweat crept down her back. At the very moment
that the man grabbed his axe with both hands and prepared to swing
it over his head, she pulled the trigger and unleashed the
untethered cartridge probe, zapping the executioner square in the
chest with 30,000 volts in one powerful, bowel-watering charge of
electricity. Before the man dropped his axe, before he hit the deck
face-first, his limbs jerking with his seizure, the Taser was
jammed back in her pocket, and Greta was pushing the rosary into
her hands. She grabbed Ella’s hands with her own.

“Close your eyes!” she ordered.

Ella squeezed her eyes shut. At this point
she wasn’t totally sure creating the picture of earnest prayer was
just playacting. She heard the crowd quiet as if dazed. She could
sense people near her moving as if trying to look around for the
source of the mysterious attack. Given the setting, the sight of
two nuns huddled in prayer must not have looked all that unusual.
In the midst of the confused murmurings from the onlookers she
heard the whimpering of the boy and now the sounds of the mother
calling to him. The crowd began to get louder but Ella dared not
open her eyes to see what was going on.

Later, they left the market without buying
anything and trudged the long way back to the convent. Once they
were sure no one suspected them and they were safely in the dining
hall, Beatrix told how the crowd had lifted the boy from the bloody
stage and deposited him into his mother’s arms. Satisfied that the
executioner had been stopped by God Himself, the mob had acted
accordingly. For they could only believe that the boy must be
innocent after all.

That night after dinner, as Ella was washing
dishes with a young novice, Greta entered the dank kitchen and
dismissed the girl. She picked up a wet rag to dry the crockery as
Ella handed it to her.

“I’m not used to washing dishes without
soap,” Ella said. “Hope I’m doing it right.”

Greta smiled but didn’t answer.

“Something on your mind, Greta?”

“Your weapon,” Greta said as she stacked a
dry dish on the counter. “It made a loud report but the man you
shot lives and does not show any wound. It was not a gun you shot
him with?”

“No, it was a Taser. In fact, thank God, it
was one of the newer designs. Most Tasers would’ve shot out a
string of wires tracing back to my gun. This one is able to shoot
out a slug that does the job without wires. Which is good because
someone in the crowd was bound to see where they were coming
from.”

“Can this Taser be used again?”

Ella frowned and wiped the sweat from her
forehead. “Yes,” she said. “Normally. But I don’t have any more
cartridges with me.”

“Then it is a liability. I will have Gwen
bury it in the garden.”

“I guess that’s wise.” Ella paused. “Greta?
Did you know what we’d find in the marketplace today?”

The nun sighed. “I feared it but hoped for
the best. The square is the main site for executions and witch
burnings, I’m afraid.”

“It was horrible,” Ella said. “The most
horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It had a happy ending today,” the nun said,
smiling.

“Except for that first guy.”

“Yes, except for him.”

“This is a dangerous place, Greta. It’s a
miracle you’ve survived this long.”

“It is a hard time. A brutal time.”

“No kidding it is. Don’t they have laws here
to protect people?”

“What you saw today with the young man and
the child was the law in action.”

Ella said nothing and the two worked
silently. She didn’t know Greta well yet but she was learning. The
nun would tell her in her own time.

“My ward, Hannah,” Greta finally said, “was
given to me at the foot of the execution square twelve years ago,”
she said.

Ella turned and looked at her. “Her mother
was killed?”

Greta nodded. “Burned at the stake.”

“Jesus! Sorry, sorry. But what a hellacious
world you choose to live in.”

“I can see why you would
think that.” The Mother Superior carefully stacked another clean
plate on top of the others. “Hannah would not speak at first. She
cried for her mother every night right up to the point where she
stopped crying for her and started calling me
mother
.”

Ella looked at her. “She
wasn’t calling you that as short for
Mother Superior
, I take
it.”

“No,” Greta said with a
smile. “When she said it she meant
mutti
. She became in all the ways
that mattered, my beloved daughter. I insisted she become a novice
so that I could keep her safe here at the nunnery, although she had
never an interest in the outside world anyway.”

Greta seemed to fight to keep her emotions
under control.

“We’ll get her back, Greta,” Ella said,
touching her friend on the shoulder. “Somehow we will.”

“Oh, Ella,” Greta said, wiping away a tear
and smiling bravely at her. “There is no John Wayne in 1620 to
rescue the poor damsel. I am afraid real life is nothing like the
movies.”

“Well, I wouldn’t tell John Wayne that,”
Ella said, turning and plunging her hands into the soapless
dishwater. “Because honestly? I’ve heard that that’s just the sort
of statement that makes him all the more determined.”

The next morning, Ella woke up early by one
of the silent novices who smiled shyly and beckoned her from her
room. After bathing without soap with a stone bowl of cold water
and attempting to dry herself with a rag that had absolutely no
absorption or wicking properties, Ella put on the habit she had
worn the day before and followed the novice down the steep stone
steps to the kitchen. There, she found Greta peeling vegetables and
talking with two nuns. When Ella entered, the others left the room
in a swish of skirts leaving behind a light fragrance of lemons and
flowers.

Where were they getting the
soap
? she wondered with irritation.
I’d kill for one squeeze of body wash about
now.

“Good morning, Ella,” Greta said, putting
down the knife and wiping her hands on a less-than-clean towel.
“Will you have breakfast?”

“I’m surprised you still
call it that,” Ella said grumpily.
Stale
bread and cheap wine does not qualify as breakfast.
In her own time, she was a big believer in a
proper breakfast, sometimes pulling in half a day’s calories in
that meal alone. She loved everything about typical breakfast
foods: ham and cheese omelets, bacon, cheese grits, buttered
muffins.

Using the same knife she had been using on
the potatoes, Greta pulled out a loaf of bread, cut off a large
slice, and placed it on top of the cook stove.

“If I remember correctly,” she said, “the
English like their toast in the morning.”

Biting her tongue so as not to remind Greta
that there were significant differences between the English and the
Americans, Ella decided that all in all, a piece of toast would be
very nice.

“You don’t drink coffee in 1620?” Ella asked
as she seated herself at the kitchen table.

Greta laughed.
“Well,
we
don’t
because it is only for the wealthy. Oh, I have not thought about a
cup of hot coffee in so long! How nice that would be this morning,
yes?”

Ella rubbed her eyes tiredly. She knew there
must be a reason the novice had brought her to Greta this early in
the morning and surely it was not to be tortured with a medieval
breakfast.

“Elise has found a blackberry bush not too
far from here,” Greta said as she turned the bread over on the
stove. “So you will have a sort of jam with your toast this
morning.”

“Awesome,” Ella said, hoping she didn’t
sound ungrateful.

Oblivious to sarcasm, Greta placed a bowl of
twenty blackberries on the table in front of Ella. She beamed as
she watched Ella’s reaction.

What a wretch I
am
, Ella thought.
These berries are a luxury for these women and they want me
to have them.
All of a sudden, the berries
looked special. Perhaps not as precious as an Egg McMuffin would’ve
been, Ella thought, but still special.

“Thank you,” Ella said, popping one of the
sour berries into her mouth. She fought to keep from making a face.
“Mmm-mm!”

“Today, Margot will show you how to bake
bread,” Greta said. She picked up the toasted bread slice from the
stove and handed it to Ella on a chipped stoneware plate. “We must
all do our part,” she said.

“Sure, yeah, that’d be great,” Ella said. “I
like to bake. That would be cool.”

“When you are a little more familiar with
our ways, we will talk again about Herr Krüger.”

I scared her
yesterday
, Ella thought, biting into the
toast.
She doesn’t trust me to behave
properly in this world.

“So I should just stay in the convent, you
think?”

“I think that would be best. Until you are a
little more familiar with everything.”

“Sure, I can see that,” Ella said, smiling.
“No problem.”

What felt like hours later,
Ella took a break from pounding dough in the cold kitchen and
wandered out to the garden.
The morning
sun felt good on her back as she sat on the low stonewall encasing
the little plot and watched Greta pull weeds. Ella realized that
just sitting in the sun was something she would never do in her
normal life. It felt too indolent. Funny, it didn’t feel indolent
now. It felt in balance with all the steady physical activity that
filled her hours from morning until her head hit the pillow,
exhausted, each night.

“You are thinking, yes?”

“Trying not to,” Ella said. “But now that
you mention it, I wanted to ask you about the specifics of how we
got here?”

“You are not speaking evolutionary now, I
think?”

“I like your sense of humor, Greta. It’s
subtle. But seriously. Got any theories?”

Greta dusted the dirt off her hands and
reached into the front bodice of her habit. She pulled out a gold
chain. On the end hung a wedding ring.

“Many years ago,” she said. “I met a woman
who talked as if she were like us. You know what I mean?”

“She came from another time?”

“Yes. But she had…information. She knew
things about why it was so. She told me that I was able to…travel
to this time…because I had a special amulet.”

“Your wedding band?”

“It’s not just the ring,” Greta said,
holding it in the palm of her hand. “It is what the ring means to
me.”

“You mean your husband?”

Greta nodded. “Love. Guilt. Strong
emotion.”

Without thinking, Ella reached for her own
necklace with the opal that had belonged to her mother.

Greta smiled. “It is very special to you,
no?”

“It was my mother’s,” Ella said, “who died
when I was very young.”

“You never knew her.” Greta touched the
opal. “For you, this stone is a mother’s love. How precious it must
be to you.”

“You think this necklace helped me get
here.”

“The woman said several things must happen
in order for the conditions to be right. They don’t all have to
happen, but having an amulet, she said, is essential.”

“And the storm?”

Greta shrugged. “It was not storming when
the woman came to this time period.”

“Can I talk to her, this woman? Maybe she
can tell me how to pinpoint—”

Greta was shaking her head.

“Yeah, okay,” Ella said. “Do I want to
know?”

Greta tucked her necklace back into her
bodice and turned to the mound of dirt in front of her. “It was
Hannah’s mother,” she said sadly.

Chapter Nine

As 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.