Swept Away (20 page)

When the other women went back to concentrating on their meal, Ella turned to Heike and gave her a questioning look.

“Helga,” Heike whispered, keeping her eye on Cook at the end of the table. “Her name was Helga.”

Ella returned home that evening with a deep cut across her eyebrow.

“What the
hell
, Ella?” Rowan's frustration at how helpless he was to protect her was pinging off him like a palpable energy. He paced the kitchen as Greta stitched up the cut with a needle and thread.

“Not helping, Rowan,” Ella said. She winced as Greta carefully put the needle through the eyebrow.

“I mean, do you do any chores there,” Rowan asked, raising his voice, “or is it all just
beat the shit out of the new boy
?”

“It's a little bit of both, to be honest,” Ella said with a grimace. “Ouch!”

“I am so sorry, Ella!” Greta said, sucking in a breath.

“No, just do it and ignore me,” Ella said. “As I am trying to ignore Mr. Helpful here.”

Rowan watched Ella bite her lip as Greta worked on her. He wanted to scold her or hold her. He wanted to forbid her from returning to the castle. He tried to remember ever feeling this out of control in his life.

Greta finished and handed Ella a small glass of brandy.

“God, we're all going to be alcoholics before we leave the seventeenth century,” Ella said. She drank it and her eyes watered immediately.

Rowan sat down at the kitchen table and reached for her hands. He rubbed them with his big, rough hands, while watching her eyes. She seemed so vulnerable, especially with all her hair cut off. Her slender, exposed neck and big brown eyes looked all the more winsome without hair framing her face.

“Okay,” he said gruffly, “what else are we doing on the Axel-the-Bastard front? A forged birth certificate isn't as good as some kind of testimony.”

“Well,” Ella said, running her fingers through her cropped hair and fighting off a yawn. “Funny you should say that. I was thinking of creating a secret diary where Axel's mother confesses that she took a lover. Her name was Helga, by the way. Unfortunately, it turns out Helga was illiterate. I thought all nobility during this time could read and write.”

“Helga was Krüger's concubine before he married her,” Greta said. She put away her sewing kit.

“Yeah, I found that out.”

“You're being careful about eavesdropping, right?” Rowan said. “I mean, a stable boy listening at keyholes is pretty suspicious.”

“I don't have to obviously snoop, Rowan. Today I worked in the kitchen nearly the whole day. The staff talks about her constantly. Krüger was obsessed with her. You would not
believe
the gossip in that place.”

“Okay, so no diary. Plan B?”

“We need a live person who'll testify that Helga had a lover at the same time she was with Krüger. I figure the midwife who delivered Axel would be perfect.”

“How the hell are you going to do that?” Rowan said.

Ella held up her iPhone. “I thought we could use the video function on this to record Helga confessing that Axel is her love child with the nefarious troubadour Herr
Klein
.”

“That is literally the most asinine idea I ever heard of.” Rowan shook his head and walked to the window to see if anyone was coming down the road. He stood with his back to them.

Greta opened a small vial of salve, dipped her finger in it and lightly dabbed at the wound over Ella's eye. “You know she is deceased,” Greta said.

“It doesn't matter,” Ella said. “
I'm
going to play the part.”

Greta squinted at Ella and frowned. “Helga was blonde.”

“I can make a blonde wig good enough for my purposes. Trust me, nobody will be looking that closely anyway.”

“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.

L
ater 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.

I
t 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.

E
lla's morning
had been long and painful. The other stable boys were bolder in their taunting of her and she had to work harder to stay out of their way. Her moment finally came when the stable master ordered her to the castle to deliver an armful of wood for the castle kitchen fire. He also sent her with instructions to steal as many biscuits as she could, disregarding the fact that her hands would be lopped off at the wrist if she were caught. Ella gathered up the faggots in her arms and rushed up the pathway to the castle, dodging two riders coming down the path toward the town. She was amazed again at how little value seemed to be placed on the lower classes in 1620. If either of the riders had killed or maimed her, the castle would merely be compensated for their financial loss—something along the lines of the cost of a tavern supper, she guessed—and that would be the end of it.

Once inside the castle kitchen, Ella realized that something had happened. Cook and the other women were excitedly moving about and talking loudly. Since she was supposed to be a mute, she couldn't ask what happened—and her understanding of 1620 German wouldn't allow it anyway—but she sensed that this was her opportunity and she didn't want to waste it. Heike ran by holding an empty kettle and Ella put her hand out. She tried to communicate with her hands and facial expression:
what is wrong?
Heike blurted out: “Herr Axel's men have been murdered in the city! Seven men slain by a warlock!”

Ella stared as the rest of the kitchen continued its frenetic activity around her.
Why does this smell like Rowan?
she thought, as worry and tension began to build in her chest. She dumped the wood in the basket by the fire, then strained to understand the seventeenth century German being spoken around her. When she heard the word
Kloster
, she felt sick to her stomach.
Kloster
meant
convent
. It
was
Rowan!
Dear God, was this his idea of creating a distraction? What happened to the timeline? What happened to the bonfire idea?
Torn between bolting for the convent immediately and going forward with her plan, she quickly realized she couldn't waste the opportunity the disruption created—whatever its source—by leaving.

It was easy to slip out of the kitchen unnoticed. Ella grabbed a basket of freshly baked scones and went through the interior door that led deep into the castle. This time, she didn't hide from the voices she heard ahead. With the ruckus over Axel's murdered henchmen no one was interested in a simple kitchen worker carrying a basket of muffins through the castle. Unlike the last time, she knew exactly where she was going.

Careful not to get eye contact with anyone, Ella straightened her shoulders and acted like she had every reason to be walking down the great hall to the stone staircase that led to the upstairs rooms. She saw the stairs and again found herself praying no one would be coming down as she ascended. It was one thing to pass her disguise off at a distance of twenty feet, but quite another pressed face to face on a narrow stairwell.

She was only a few feet from the stairs when a powerful hand clamped down on her shoulder and twisted her around. She cried out and nearly dropped the basket. The man looked closely into her face. He had a lazy eye and his mouth was full of broken, brown teeth. It was all Ella could do not to cringe away from his hideous face. She recognized him as one of the castle footmen when she saw his livery and gloves.

“
Wo gehen Sie
?” he said.

Ella held up the basket and pointed to the stairs.

“
Hat Herr Axel sie bitten?”
he asked. His tone was a little less aggressive, Ella thought. She nodded, hoping she looked the picture of obsequiousness. It occurred to her that this guy probably enjoyed terrorizing the infirm but would draw the line at getting in the way of a direct order from his lordship.

“
Schnell! Schnell! Lass ihn nicht warten
!” he shrieked. Ella turned to run up the stairs, her heart pounding. When she got to the top of the stairs, she looked down the long hall.

Her plan was to hide herself in a closet or behind a drape in order to hear something useful, then sneak out undetected. She knew if she'd shared the details of her plan with Rowan, he'd probably have tied her to the kitchen sink. Even though he knew as well as she did that they had run out of time and she was the only one who could move things forward.

She passed two closed doors down the hall. One she knew was Axel's bedroom. She stopped in front of a closed set of double doors. She hesitated, holding the basket and trying to decide what to do. She could hear voices inside. She peeked through the gap in the hinges into the room's interior. It was Krüger's office. She could see a massive desk and velvet drapes on the wall behind it. Ella sucked in a breath. There, behind the desk, was none other than Axel Krüger talking to the lord of the castle, himself.

“I tell you, it will be the final crushing blow that delivers all of Germany to us,” Krüger said.

“We have enough with Heidelberg,” Axel said. He was slouching in a blatant pose of boredom and disrespect.

“For now, perhaps,” Krüger said, leaning intently toward his son and lowering his voice. “But the Prince has twisted in the wind many times and may well again on this issue.”

Axel snorted in derision but said nothing.

“My sources tell me he is sending Reicher to open the market fair in ten days time,” Krüger said.

“Eric Reicher is a fool,” Axel said. “And a papist.”

“Nonetheless,” Krüger said, “he has the Prince's ear.”

“I will not woo the prince's pet dog,” Axel said. “You have gone insane to even think it.”

“I would not ask you to woo him.”

“What then?”

“Kill him,” his father said. He spread out his hands in a flourish as if presenting a gift to his son.

Axel was silent for a moment and then laughed. His hand went to the hilt of his sword.

“You want me to kill him,” he said.