Heidelberg Effect

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “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 behav
e 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.

  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.”

  Hans 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 fath
er, 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?”