By the Bay

The man who walked out of the dark water of the bay that December night insisted he was not a pirate, but a privateer. Dashing Philippe de Beauvois took Jillian Blake's breath away from that first moment when she met him down by the sandy edge of the water. Has she fallen in love with a madman? Philippe claimed to be one of Jean Lafitte's captains preparing for the battle of New Orleans. In Jillian's world it is 1942 and her whole community fears the presence of enemy submarines in the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Sent on a whirlwind through time, the lovers fight to survive and stay together through the chaos caused by a scientific experiment gone wrong.

By
the Bay
:
A
Time Travel Romance

By the Bay
:
A
Time Travel Romance

Published by Barbara Bartholomew at Amazon Kindle

Copyright 2012 by Barbara Bartholomew

Chapter One

Her red hair
loose and
whipping in the wind, Jillian walked the scant half-
block
to the bay, knowing she shouldn’t be out at this time of night in this place where rough men drifted across the landscape
. She was
unable
, however,
to resist the pull of the bay and the dark
G
ulf that lay just beyond the barrier island. She’d been brought here by the worst of circumstances, but somewhere inside she still rejoiced. She was back
in
the little town at the very tip of Texas. She was in Port Isabel. She was home.

Even the air was different. Especially the air, thick and heavy-leaden with salty moisture, she breathed in deep gulps even as she stopped and dug the toes of her shoes into the sand, watching the thin crust of a moon cast chancy shadows on the water
.

The town was silent behind her, its residents sleeping in the middle of the night or huddled in despair in this first full year of the war. When rational enough to connect with the real world,
her
mother despaired of her daughter’s future, a future she
felt sure
she would not share, mumbling about the battles that were consuming the world and the hatred that was moving out from Europe and the east like dual monsters devouring life and culture.

Jillian tried to put the tragedy that was her mother’s life from her mind for just a little and to dwell only in the past when she’d been growing up here and when she’d raced bayside with a
M
ason jar and a large spoon, intent on capturing sand fiddlers. She’d eagerly dug them from their sandy burrows, placing both the tiny crabs and the sand in the jar to take back to the cottage with her as though they were some sort of miniature pets. She’d wanted a porpoise too,
those
magical creatures that skimmed high above the waters of the bay, and was told that when she was very small she’d informed relatives she would keep
one
in her bathtub.

This was home, the scruffy little port town where wanderers and fishermen met, sharing an uncommon love of the sea, and where each person was an individual of eccentric and surprising character. To Jillian it was the most fascinating place in the world and it welcomed her as one of its own after the past
couple of
years of exile in flat, dusty Kansas
which was only beginning to see prosperity again after years of dust and poverty.

She’d been glad enough, at first, when her aunt had invit
ed
her to come, promising her employment when that was a rare thing, so that she’d be able to support her ailing mother and herself.
She’d had no choice
but
to go, though Mother had begged her not to and had absolutely refused to go with her.

Jillian had read of blackouts in England where bombers raided by night, but here nearly a year after the Pearl Harbor attack had brought the country into open conflict
,
a few lights still sparkled in the middle of the night, the little Gulf Coast town vulnerable and innocent in the darkness, its lights a beacon for submarines seeking entrance at this soft spot in
the country’s
defense.

She shook away the thought. There was a Coast Guard station here and if they thought there was real danger, they would have doused those lights.  Deliberately she lost her thoughts again in the past.

She’d grown up here with her mother as her only parent after her father
, who was the local chief of police
,
died in an accidental shooting,
and it had been a good childhood set as it was against the sea and the Mexican border only a few miles away. Most people were as poor as
them
and Mother had worked at the little grocery store only a few blocks away where she got to know just about everyone in town.

She’d had family near too. As one of five sisters,
two
of them who had homes just up the valley while
Aunt Florence
was resident in Port Isabel itself, she’d offered her daughter the advantages of extended family, people to
give
comfort and company in the weeks when Mother was lost in pain and sadness.

She’d played with the children next door, gone to school with the same children year after year, and on a good day had taken the ferry with Mother across to the long, skinny island where she could have the sand and the surf to herself all day long.

She smiled, remembered how she’d been tucked into long sleeves and
long legged pants, her head covered with a wide hat when she’d long
ed
to feel her skin exposed to sun and wind and water. No such fate for a white-skinned red-head who never tanned but only freckled or burned and soon learned to hate the bright glare of a sunny summer beach.

She and Mother had gone to Padre Island on rainy, cloudy days and strangely enough
they still
had to be careful that
Jillian, so
milky fair,
did not
burn. Now she loved the winter
beach with its great splashing waves
of dark water, its dripping rain, and chilled air that made a sweater comforting but rarely was cold enough to call for a coat. She preferred, in fact, nights like tonight and if she’d been able would have headed straight for the lonely island just across the bay.

She wanted to see the Gulf coming in white-capped waves, to hear the pounding of the surf that was like the sound of the world’s heartbeat.

So concentrated was she on past joys that she almost walked straight into the shadowed figure of a man who stood looking out over the pier, seeming as lost in his thoughts as she was in her own.

Her heart pounded and she was reminded that though home it might be, this was a
n
isolated
little fishing town with all sorts of strange, lonely men seeking refuge on its streets. Mother always warned her about going out alone at night.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I didn’t see you there.”

He nodded. “No harm done,” he said in a voice deep and rich with a foreign accent. Her first thought was of Mother’s warning of German spies and Japanese U boats, and then she laughed softly
. She was so accustomed to the Spanish spoken by her Mexican neighbors that for a moment she had not identified the unfamiliar sound in this man’s voice. He was French and that country gave his speech its intriguing music.

He smelled of the sea and even in the dim light from the waning moon she could see that he
w
as tall, though she couldn’t make out his features, nor tell if he was old or young.

Laughter lit his voice as he said, “You are the last thing I expected to find here tonight. A
jeune fille
at this hour of night and in this place. I am tempted to think you must be a mermaid come ashore or perhaps a siren sent to tempt me into dangerous waters.”

She wasn’t accustomed to hear anyone talk like this with a hint of poetry, not the farmers of Kansas nor the Port Isabel fishermen. They were rough, blunt men with noses for reality and an edge of embarrassment for spoken words they considered too pretty.

Aww, but he was French, from that unfortunate land that found itself besieged for the second time in this century, torn apart by contention.

“Neither a mermaid nor a siren,” she responded lightly, stepping back a few feet with a sudden awareness that even well spoken men could offer risk, that a wolf often wore sheep’s clothing,
and
that a German spy could put on a French accent. “Just a poor school teacher
taking a midnight walk.”

“Not a safe place for a girl to be walking,” he cautioned. “Strange occurrences take place in these waters by night.”

She shook her head. “I grew up here. I’ve lived in our little cottage by the bay since I was a baby and I can run home in a minute. I feel safe enough.”

“And yet you stand here chatting with a bad man.”

She laughed uneasily. Surely he was joking. “You’re not a bad man. I could tell if you were.”

He laughed again as though she’d said something highly amusing. “If only that were true, ma belle.”

Beauty? He couldn’t even see her face. How could he say she was beautiful?

He insisted then on walking her back to the cottage, waiting at the gate, watching as she went inside. She felt slightly annoyed that this  intriguing stranger was treating her in such a mannerly fashion. It was the story of her life. Adventure was never her lot. She was destined for the commonplace.

Once inside and the door locked behind her, she went to peek out the
front
window. He was gone, vanished into the night.