Heidelberg Effect (25 page)

The next morning, Ella was up before
daylight. The other boys already thought she was odd and the fact
that she didn’t sleep at the stable only intensified their
distrust. Getting there before they awoke at least helped to
de-emphasize her strangeness. As she ran up the pathway in the dark
to the castle, she collided with a young woman dressed in dark rags
who was nearly invisible in the dim light. Ella gasped as the two
tumbled to the hard paving stones in the castle courtyard. The girl
squealed and lashed out with a fist, obviously thinking she was
being attacked. Ella dared not speak for fear of revealing her sex
and so only covered her head with her arms against the girl’s
blows.

“Who are you?” the girl whispered when it
became clear to her that Ella was no threat. Ella stood up, hoping
her attire would be all the answer the girl needed. They recognized
each other immediately, even in the gloom. The girl was a kitchen
maid that Ella had seen once when she had been sent to the castle
kitchen to fetch a basket of rotten apples for the horses.

“Your name?” she said to Ella, as she stood
with one hand on her hip and the other holding an empty wicker
basket.

Ella shook her head and kept her eyes glued
to the ground. The girl waited a moment and then touched her
arm.

“Come with me,” she said. “I’ll tell Cook to
inform the stable master we’ll need you in the house this
morning.”

Ella hesitated. She knew
that this would
not
end up being a good thing for her later with the other boys.
On the other hand, spending more time in the castle
was
the whole reason she
was doing this very dangerous charade every day. She followed the
maid into the castle.

As soon as they entered the kitchen, Ella
felt a welcoming blast of heat accompanied by a heady aroma of
baked muffins. She had left the convent this morning without her
usual breakfast of bread. The little maid, Heike, spoke rapid,
incomprehensible German to the glowering fat cook—a mean-faced
woman with a wicked wooden spoon in her hand. The cook made a
grimace in Ella’s direction then said a few words to Heike before
turning away.

Heike gestured for Ella to
sit by the fire and brought her a plate with two muffins on it.
“You’ll work here, today,” she said. “
Ja
?”

Ella nodded and stuffed one of the muffins
into her mouth—partly to stay in character as the dim-witted stable
boy and partly because they smelled amazing. As she ate, she
noticed that no one left to inform the stable master of her
whereabouts. She supposed it didn’t matter. She’d be beaten either
way.

The kitchen was cavernous with every
available bit of wall space covered with a shelf, étagère, oven or
table. A half dozen other women were bustling about the room, their
faces relaxed but intent. Ella couldn’t help but think these women
liked their work. They had the same kind of concentrated expression
she, herself, sometimes had when her work was engaging and
interesting. One or two of them actually looked in her direction
and smiled.

Shit
,
why couldn’t Greta have gotten her
a position in the kitchen?
she wondered,
eating the last bite of her muffin.

After a few minutes, Heike
led her to a large cement sink full of dirty water and a tall stack
of crockery. She handed Ella a rag and pointed to the sink.
Beats scooping horse
dung, Ella thought. Determined to be a credit to Heike’s
kindness, Ella plunged her hands into the icy water, a film of oil
floating on top, and marveled once more that anyone lived past
childhood in this world of dirt and bacteria. As she worked, she
noticed that, unlike in the stables, the others in the kitchen
ignored her. It gave her the opportunity to examine the kitchen and
its workers more closely.

She could see three entrances to the
kitchen. The one that she and Heike had used was narrow and came in
from the outside. Another larger entrance was at the end of the
room where she soon saw the double wooden doors open and a horse
and cart standing outside. Deliveries, she decided. The third
entrance was at the top of a short stairwell. It had a wide, arched
doorway which led into the interior of the castle. As she washed
and stacked the dishes—careful not to drop one since she wasn’t
absolutely sure of the punishment—she watched the cook. If Ella
were to slip away, it would be the cook she’d need to evade. Before
Ella could put together a plan to find a way into the castle, Heike
handed her a towel for her hands and motioned her to a large table
where the other women were already seated.

Ella took her place at the table and was
startled when Heike on one side and a plump, sweet-faced woman on
the other each took her hands. Cook, at the head of the table,
stood up and recited a brief prayer. She then nodded with
satisfaction and a girl of no more than ten years old began ladling
out a steaming meaty soup into bowls for everyone. Ella was nearly
in shock with the civility of the noon meal. The mean-faced cook
even patted the ten-year old on the shoulder and laughed at a
comment from one of the workers.

Her bowl of soup sat in front of her. As she
reached for her metal spoon, it occurred to Ella that a close
examination of her hands would reveal to anyone that she was not a
young boy. While not manicured, thank goodness, they were slim and
feminine with a white line showing where she normally wore a gold
signet ring on her ring finger.

“You are not hungry?” Heike asked, pointing
to Ella’s bowl.

Great, now I’ve called
attention to myself,
Ella thought, as
three heads turned to look at her hesitation to eat. She grabbed up
her spoon and took a heaping mouthful, burning her lips and tongue
before spitting it out into the bowl.

Everyone laughed, and Heike pushed a small
mug of beer toward Ella. Before Ella could pick it up, she heard a
shriek at the far end of the table. All the women jumped to their
feet. Ella spilled her beer as Heike grabbed her sleeve to make her
stand, too. Cook bunched her apron in front of her as she massaged
the cloth nervously. The women stood at their places, looking down,
their eyes either closed or fixated on the table.

And there, next to Cook, stood Axel. Before
Ella tore her eyes away from him to study the table like the
others—and pray he didn’t notice her—she couldn’t help but
recognize that he had an electric charisma that thrummed about him.
He was handsome, to be sure, but it was the energy that he emanated
that announced his presence and made him appear bigger than
life.

Sweat trickled down her back under her
stable boy clothes. She prayed that if there was anything memorable
about her from her two run-ins with him, it was disguised in a
concealing patina of grime.

If he recognized her, she was dead.

The other women at the table were stone
silent as Axel spoke to Cook in friendly and cordial tones. Twice,
Ella had to force herself to remain looking at her soup bowl.

“Guten morgen,
mutti
,” Axel said. “Lunch smells
good.”

“Has Herr Krüger eaten yet?” Cook asked
meekly, gasping between words.

“No time,” he said. “I am heading into town
on a very important mission for my father.”

“May I m-m-make your lordship something?”
Cook said, her fear evident to all.

“Nein
,” he said. “Finish your lunch. I didn’t mean to
interrupt.”

Was this the asshole Axel
excusing himself to a servant?
Ella forced
herself not to look to make sure it was really him.

“Nobody makes
broetchen
like
you,
mutti
,” Axel
said. “May I have one for my journey?”

“Of course,
mein herr
,” Cook said,
scurrying to the cupboard. Ella imagined she could feel her own
sweat dripping through her clothes to the stone floor below. She
could sense he was looking at them now.

“It certainly all looks delicious,” Axel
said to the table of women. No one spoke. When Cook returned, Ella
heard a sound she never in a million years would have expected.

The sound of a kiss.

Axel took the bag, thanked Cook and left the
kitchen as silently as he had come. When Ella looked up, she saw
Cook slump into her seat on the bench, then place both hands
against the table and look up at the women who were still standing.
She motioned them to sit down.

“
Well, that doesn’t happen
very often,” Heike said, picking up her beer cup and frowning at
the spot where Ella had spilled hers. “Cook knew him as a small
boy, you see,” she said.

“She mothered him when his own mother died,
God rest her soul,” a woman next to Ella said.

“I never knew his mother, of course,” Heike
said. “But the whole castle knows what an angel she was.”

Ella ate her soup and tried not to register
her understanding. She knew enough German to decipher what they
were saying but to avoid suspicion she needed to keep her cover
tacked firmly in place.

“Herr Krüger was bereft when she died,” said
another of the kitchen workers down the table. “He went into
mourning that some say he has never recovered from.”

Just then, Cook banged her spoon against the
table and waved it at them. “Don’t speak of her,” she said. She
looked over her shoulder at the hallway where Axel had disappeared.
“It upsets him to hear her name.”

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.”