[Tempus Fugitives 01.0] Swept Away

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  The weather was clear and bright and Ella practically skipped, she was so eager to be walking. Kitchen work had left her shoulders sore and aching at night but it was a poor substitute for the full body aerobic classes she used to take. Ella was careful to walk slowly and look directly downward but she stole periodic glances of the castle and the shops that lined the road past Bismarckplatz toward the main square.

  The old nun she walked with was mute, or so Ella assumed since she had never heard her speak. The young girl seemed as eager as Ella to be out, although she was well trained to keep her eyes down with her hands on the empty wicker basket she carried.

  They had barely entered the marketplace when it happened.

  Ella, grateful that there appeared to be nothing bloody and upsetting happening on the raised platform in the square in front of the cathedral, had forgotten to keep her eyes down and was drinking in the sights and sounds of 1620 Heidelberg. It wasn’t until a man roughly grabbed her from behind that she even realized that she had been smiling—a sign of madness in 1620.

  “A juicy one!” the man shouted, pawing at Ella with heavy hands. She glanced at the elder nun who seemed resolute in keeping her eyes on the ground and who continued toward the market ignoring what was happening to Ella. The young novice never looked up.

  The man twisted Ella around in his arms and a foul blast of breath smelling of decayed teeth and his breakfast hit her full in the face. She dropped her basket and fought to free herself from his iron grasp, feeling her stomach knot with revulsion. She looked around and saw very few people interested in what was happening and she felt a tightening in her chest as the man began to rake up the skirt of her habit.

  Holy shit, this ape was going to rape her in the middle of the effing marketplace! She fought his hands with hers for the briefest of moments to keep her skirt down when it occurred to her that if he turned her over or got her on the ground, she was done. When that thought hit her, she willed herself to do the opposite of what her instinct told her to do. She pulled him towards her so that they were face to face and she could see the surprise in his eyes. He was not a revoltingly homely man—even if the smell coming off him was making her eyes water—but the look in his eye was as sadistic and base as she had ever seen. Keeping eye contact with him, she screamed in his face and brought her knee up sharply into his groin. In a second, she felt him release her and she stumbled away from his falling body, her own heavy skirts trapping her. She scrambled to her feet and looked over his shoulder to see if he had a friend who might avenge him. What she saw made the sweat that was creeping down the small of her back turn to ice.

  Axel.

  9

  He stood holding a white horse by the halter and laughing at what must have looked like street performance to him. He was dressed in velvet breeches and soft suede knee-high boots. His jacket was embroidered in rich colors of burgundy and gold. Unlike this brother, his hair was long and dark. He was handsome but Ella could see the coldness in his eyes even from a distance. She was wearing the habit of a novice from the convent. He could see immediately what she was.

  He watched her over the writhing man on the ground and smiled. Ella stood up straight, her heart pounding, her stomach ready to empty on the ground before her. She placed her hands on her hips and stared him down. She lifted her chin.

  Motherfucker, she thought as she stood and watched him, her knees trembling, her breath coming in ragged snatches. Preying on the weak. Torturing women, torturing Greta. The more she looked at him, the angrier she felt herself becoming. And she did not move. A man came up behind Axel and spoke in his ear and Axel nodded and waved him away as if he were an annoying fly. His eyes raked Ella from top to bottom, clearly mentally undressing her. Then, without breaking eye contact with her, he reached down with his hand and grabbed the protruding codpiece he wore between his legs and squeezed it. With the same hand, he pointed at Ella.

  “I will see you soon, little sister,” he said. He gave the gurgling man on the cobblestones a mean laugh, mounted his horse and knocked over a large display of apples and freshly baked tarts as he rode away.

  Ella watched him go and felt her hands go clammy and cold. Movement out of the corner of her eye quickly confirmed to her that the man on the ground was regaining control. She turned and ran.

  Rowan looked at the GPS on his cellphone and then at the number on the building. This was it. This was where she lived. He scratched his chin and looked down the long street. Kleinschmidtstrasse. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. He’d never sent Ella an actual letter so her address hadn’t really played a part in his need-to-know reservoir. He looked up at the stacks of ancient windows facing the street and wondered which one was her apartment. She had talked about a bookstore outside her balcony. He turned the corner and saw the store in front of him. When he looked up at the building across the street from it, he saw her balcony and his heart seemed to pound harder.

  He had no expectation that he would find her there but he could always hope. She didn’t answer her landline or her cellphone. Her office said they had heard nothing from her since the day she quit, now almost three weeks ago. Her father, whom he had called from the Atlanta airport on his way to Frankfurt, had officially become a certified basket case of nerves and anxiety.

  Rowan entered the building. The stairs were wide but steep and smooth, worn slick from centuries of feet pounding up and down them. Not trusting the rickety and ancient elevator, Rowan bounded up the steps to the third floor. He had stopped by the rental management office on his way in from the train station, paid a month’s rent and picked up another set of keys.

  Just that easy.

  He found her apartment and unlocked the door. It was a little musty and if he had to bet, he’d say that no one had been in it for these three weeks. He dropped his travel bag on the floor and stood in the foyer of the tiny apartment. The kitchen opened to the living room and faced the front door. The first thing he saw was the framed photo of the two of them taken their last night together.

  Shit, Ella, he thought. Looking at the picture, seeing how happy she looked that night, and how beautiful she was.

  Where are you?

  After a quick shower and a plate of wienerschnitzel in the restaurant downstairs, Rowan used his GPS to walk the route to Ella’s office. The light was dying but he looked carefully down every alleyway and every side street, trying to imagine how she might have left her apartment and not arrived at her destination. When he got to her office building, the employees long since gone, he checked his watch. Ella was a fast walker and easily kept up with him and his much longer legs. She would have made it here in twenty minutes. Satisfied, he walked back to her apartment as the lights of the clubs and restaurants came along the way.

  He checked the answering machine in her apartment to make sure no one had called while he was out. Then he went to bed.

  The next morning, he was standing in the lobby of her office by eight o’clock. A luscious German babe sat at the front desk typing texts into her cellphone. She looked up and smiled flirtatiously with him.

  That would have to be the lovely Heidi, Rowan thought. He touched the brim of his cowboy hat and she giggled.

  “Fraulein,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. Who are you waiting for?” she asked.

  “Probably you,” he said. “If you’re Heidi.”

  “I am she,” Heidi said, pinching her brows together but still smiling at him. Before he could present identification, she shrieked and clapped a hand to her mouth.

  “I guess the penny dropped,” he said.

  “You are Ella’s cowboy,” she said when she removed her hand. “Where is she?” She stood and looked behind him as if he might be hiding her. “Ella?”

  “I don’t have her, ma’am,” Rowan said. “I was hoping you might.”

  Heidi sat down hard. “Where did she go?” she asked.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “I saw her the morning of the day she quit. She woul
dn’t talk with me. I was very hurt. I am still very hurt.”

  “You know why Ella might have handed in her resignation? She ever indicate to you she was thinking of doing that?”

  Heidi looked momentarily panicked, as if she were about to lie but didn’t feel terribly confident in the outcome.

  “Not really,” she said, now not looking at him.

  “She never let on she was thinking of quitting and moving back to the States? That’s a pretty big decision and I thought you two were close.”

  “We were close,” Heidi said. “Good morning, Hugo!” she said brightly to a tall blond man who entered the lobby. He stood with his coat over his arm and a briefcase in his free hand.

  “Good morning, Heidi.” The man stared at Rowan as if waiting to be introduced.

  “This is Ella’s American boyfriend,” Heidi said to Hugo. “He is here looking for Ella.”

  “What happened to Ella?” Hugo asked Rowan.

  Rowan turned to him. The guy looked like he could have stepped right out of a Warner Brothers World War Two movie playing the handsome and cold-blooded Nazi lead.

  “You didn’t know Ella was missing?” Rowan asked him.

  “No. Why would I?” Hugo said, making a face.

  “You were not friends?”

  “Well,” Hugo said smiling thinly at Rowan. “If you mean were we boyfriend and girlfriend, no. One night of passion does not make for those sorts of attachments over here. I know in America an expectation of marriage follows a sexual experience. This is because you Americans are, frankly—”

  Rowan had no idea while the man was speaking that he was about to deck him. It happened so fast and with so little fore thought that it was like his fist belonged to someone else. Before the bastard could finish his sentence, Rowan hauled off and socked him in the nose and watched him drop to his knees.

  Rowan turned to Heidi who had screamed but who now, it seemed to him, was trying to hold in an attack of hysterical giggles.

  “So,” he said to Heidi. “Ella quitting came as a big surprise to you.”

  Heidi looked at Rowan and then at Hugo who was holding his nose with blood pumping out of it. She grabbed her coat from the back of her chair, punched a button on her intercom and spoke rapid German into it. She came around the receptionist’s desk and stepped over Hugo on the rug.

  “Shall we get a coffee around the corner?” she said.

  Heidi stirred sugar into her coffee and smiled at Rowan. He could see she was used to being admired and forgiven many, many times over. Her skin was so flawless, it didn’t look real.

  “Hugo lied about sleeping with Ella,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. He had to admit to not feeling wonderful when the bastard said he’d slept with Ella. But it occurred to him that Heidi wasn’t the last word in truth and honesty either.

  “It was because she wouldn’t sleep with him that all the trouble started.”

  “How is that?”

  “Hugo found out a terrible secret about Ella’s family at the same time she did.”

  “And when she wouldn’t sleep with him, he told her secret.”

  “Yes,” Heidi said, sighing. “It’s despicable, really. But that is men.” Hurriedly she put a hand on Rowan’s hand as it rested on the table. “But not you, Herr Pierce. I mean most men.”

  “And the secret was so terrible that once revealed, you believe it prompted Ella to quit her job and move out of the country?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And what is this terrible secret that everyone now knows?”

  Heidi poured more cream in her coffee. Rowan felt like he was witnessing a performance of some kind but he realized it didn’t mean she wasn’t telling the truth. As beautiful as she was, she might just be used to making everything a drama.

  “Ella discovered that her grandfather was hanged as a war criminal after the war.”

  Rowan whistled.

  “Indeed,” Heidi said.

  “Yeah, that would do it.”

  “In Germany?” Heidi nodded. “She had to leave. I understand that. I just wish I had a chance to say goodbye and to tell her it didn’t matter to me.”

  “But she didn’t leave the country,” Rowan said. “She didn’t pack up her apartment. She didn’t shut off her utilities. She just disappeared.”

  “I agree that is very strange.”

  “And you have no idea where she might have gone?”

  Heidi widened her eyes. “Me? No.”

  Rowan watched her for a moment and then tossed out five Euros in coins onto the table.

  “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble at the office,” he said.

  “No, no,” she said, obviously in no hurry to go. “Hugo needed what he got. If he hadn’t told the whole office her terrible secret, Ella would not have run.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, thank you, Heidi, for all your help.”

  He smiled at her and then left the coffee shop, heading back down Kirchstrasse toward Ella’s flat.

  Well, hell, he thought as he walked. Now what?

  Axel slid the bridle over the nose of the stallion and took a half step back to carefully latch the leather strips securing it while staying out from under the beast’s constantly moving feet. Dojo, his father’s personal valet and general head of household, had suggested his father have the animal gelded or perhaps used only for stud. It had been all Axel could do not to have the old man beaten for the insult. Axel thought back to how his younger brother, Christof, had pleaded to stay Axel’s hand and how Dojo had stood bravely to face his wrath. Dojo was worth ten of Christof, Axel thought to himself with disgust.

  His mind distracted, the horse’s front right hoof lashed out and missed Axel’s instep by inches. Grabbing the bridle with both hands, its barbed bit sticking out of the beast’s mouth, Axel jerked hard until he saw its mouth bleed and the eyes full of terror. A perfect animal, he thought, easing his grip on the bridle but keeping a careful eye on him. Beautiful, powerful, lethal. Not unlike himself. He put a hand up to stroke the horse’s nose but only succeeded in making it shy violently, jerking the bridle reins from his grasp as the horse wheeled away.

  Axel felt his face redden even though there was no one to witness the horse’s behavior. It stirred in him a memory, hidden far down in his heart, and the vein in his forehead began to twitch.

  Bastard, he thought, watching the horse pace the courtyard in front of the stables. He glanced around. There was no one. Whatever chores or activities had been going on when he arrived a few minutes earlier, the boys had vanished. Even that useless stable master was nowhere to be found.

  They feared him, he thought, as he slapped his gloves against his thigh, turning his back on the horse and jerking open a stall door. He glimpsed the heel end of a boot disappear around the corner of the stall and it pleased him to think of whoever it was fleeing as if he were the devil himself. It was moments like these—when he was well and truly alone—amidst all the noise and community of the castle, that he missed her the most. He couldn’t say what it was that brought the thought of her, the smell of her into his head—where it could only cause pain. And yet he never resisted the onslaught, so infrequent were the memories.

  She had never looked at him with fear. She had only adored him. He knew that and forever after he would know it in contrast to the admiration and sycophantic love he received from every other woman he knew. She had stood between him and his father. When he was a boy and couldn’t defend himself, she took the beatings that should have been his.

  He sat down on a bale of hay in the abandoned stable yard. He could hear his horse snorting and pawing in one of the alcoves across the courtyard. The horse would soon calm himself and wander away looking for his feed, dragging his reins before him. Axel found he didn’t care if the animal tripped over them and broke his neck. The horse brought him no joy. Not even whipping helped. It just made the horse hate him.

  Just as he had hated his father so many years ago.

  His f
ather had forbidden his mother from going to the convent to nurse the sick during the last outbreak. Axel remembered hearing him tell her and he remembered, as young as he was, feeling relief that his mother would remain safe. When she tiptoed past his bedroom and found him awake, she sang to him until he was sleepy and made him promise not to tell.

  Christof was too little and too stupid, the province of his nursemaid. Mother was his. And they had secrets. It was a special pride to him that he and his mother shared their secrets. Secrets that would save him from all the beatings he deserved and never received. And this one last secret, kept so well by an earnest and adoring boy, that served to kill his angel mother as surely as if he had driven the dirk past the damask blouse and linen girdle into her loving, all-giving heart.

  He stood, the restlessness coming over him again, and looked in the direction of the convent. His silence that night killed her but not immediately. It took a fortnight for her to succumb to the pox and die by inches and pieces. Axel waited outside her room and prayed he would see her again and feel her arms around him again.

  When his father told Axel that his mother had died, he did it with a boot that sent the eight-year old sprawling down the hall where he was led away, weeping, by Dojo.

  Within a few years, his father knew better than to raise a hand to Axel. Teeth were not easily replaced and he needed every one he had to chew his food. Axel knew his position in the castle was de facto leader. No one questioned his power—no matter how savage or unreasonable. The so-called peace he made with his father was forged by Axel’s strength and cunning as his father weakened with age.

  But the convent and the Catholic holy women who had lured his mother to share their good works—and then survived when she could not—had yet to pay for their part in her death.