By the Bay (16 page)

“Here you are, son.” A cup containing water touched his lips and he tried to gulp eagerly at the fluid, but it was quickly withdrawn. “Just a sip to begin with,” a male voice cautioned. Sacre Bleu, how he hated that crisply spoken British English!

He was, then, in the hands of the enemy. “You’ve been rather badly tossed about,” the English officer’s voice soothed, “but it’s all over now
. Y
ou survive, you will no doubt be eventually returned to your home.”

To his relief, the doctor—he assumed the man was a doctor by his look and demeanor—left him to the care of a young black man, who responded quickly to his request for more water. This time he drank slowly so as not to waste a drop.

“It’s all good, Mr.
Philippe
, they don’t know who you is.”

He looked more closely at his nurse and recognized him as someone he’d met before.

“I be Randolph, “ the voice said again. “I worked for Mr. Pierre
Lafitte
at his house in New Orleans.”

“Are you captured then, Randolph? And is the battle truly lost?”

“You would say it was lost, sir, for the Americans are routed and they say the general is
hurt
so bad he may not live. But I surrendered myself willing like to the English when I heard they would offer freedom to a
ny slave that helped their side. You, sir, are the captive, but for the sake of past kindness I will not tell them who you are. I have no wish to see a good man hanged.”

He could hardly blame the man for wanting to be free. 
“And the battle is lost?” He had to be certain of that one desperate fact. “The Americans have lost New Orleans
?
”

“Even now they are looting the city.” Randolph’s voice sounded pained and Philippe guessed that the man considered the price of his freedom to have been a costly one. New Orleans had been his home, even more than it had been Philippe’s, but even home must be sold for freedom.

“They say those folks in Boston have seceded,” the former slave continued. “They have left the United States.”

Philippe closed his eyes. So then, it was all over, the grand experiment that had begun and perhaps ended in New England. The United States of America was no more. He closed his eyes again, not caring much if he died of his wounds.

But in his fevered dreams, Jillian came to him, crying out to him not to leave her, pleading with him not to give up. And in those same dreams she was warm and willing in his arms again and in spite of the horrible pass to which the world had come, he could not entirely give up.

“I think the poor fellow’s going to live,” he heard a voice say as from a great distance and recognized the British doctor’s voice.

Jillian
, he thought. Even if the rest of the world was crashing around him, for her he would live.

Chapter Twenty
Two

Even
if
he was her father, she was not ready
to confide the secrets of the last few days to him. Everything was so strange here and strangest of all was this long, hidden away building near the border between Texas and Mexico. She had no wish to open her heart and sob on daddy’s shoulder about time being all mixed up and Philippe lost back in the past.

The last thing she wanted was to be locked up in some
asylum
for
the mentally ill
when she needed to be doing what she could to get back to her husband and help him figure out what to do to save the unity between the states.

“Tell me, Jillian,” her father insisted.

She turned away from him and walked over to the nearest flashing machine, reaching out as though to touch it.

“Don’t!” he said, pulling her hand roughly away.

She stared up at him and skin nearly as
fair
as her own flushed red. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but all sorts of problems can be caused by
an
incorrect
entry.”

She had found a long time ago that silence issued its own command. Most people felt a need to fill a
void
in the conversation.

“It’s not tha
t
I’m not glad to see you.”

“So glad that you abandoned us years ago and left my mother a suffering invalid.”

The flush deepened. “I’ve been in contact with your mother for some time.”

“Not in any world I know.”

His eyes narrowed. “
You don’t understand, Jillian. I’m not exactly the man you think I am.”

“They told me you were dead.”

“That’s what they thought. In the time in which you lived, it was so.
There was
a quarrel and your mother wrestled
for the gun.”

“No,” she protested. “
That doesn’t sound like my mother.”

“It was an accident, but something she could
’n’t
deal with, or so I’ve been told. A latent mental condition surfaced and she
became
more and more unwell.”

“
If y
ou weren’t there. How could you know?”

“It was reported to me.”

She turned away from him. Apparently there were no secrets she could keep from him. He seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than she did.

“Then she,” she nodded toward the doorway, “is not really my mom. My mother is that sick woman I left behind in Port Isabel. And you’re not my dad.”

He hesitated, th
a
n motioned her to a chair, pulling another up beside her to seat himself. “I don’t quite know how to define things, but you feel like my daughter to me.”

She waited. “Jillian, it all started just before the other war, the great war. We were going to end war. We saw it coming and determined that such a catastrophe would never happen again and we were going to see to it. During the war, I was attached to an international group of scientists from all over the world, and after that conflict ended we worked even harder than before. You see, my dear, we began to have glimpses of what it would mean to walk in time.”

She couldn’t help thinking that this revelation would have shocked her whole lot
no
more a few weeks ago.

“We were such idealists. We thought if we could look at history, peek into the future, then we would have greater understanding between peoples and we could fix things.” He stared down at his hands. “By God, we were such as fools as to think we could make things better.”

“And you didn’t?”

“We only make them different. In the future, Jillian, we’ve learned that there are many realities,
that every major change branches out into a new alternative. We have simply increased the rates of those shifts.”

“And in
this
reality, you changed things so that we are no longer the United States of America, but splintered fragments that can’t even properly defend themselves.
”

He shook his head, but seemed to find it hard to go on. Finally he said, “Aw, no, my poor darling. It is not us who has caused those awful changes. It is you. You are responsible for all of it.”

That seemed so unfair that she was speechless for an instant. What had she done but live her life? What action had she taken to cause this disaster?

He smiled at her expression of disbelief. “Some of us are born with a certain rootlessness, we do not stand as firmly in our place as others. Our minds like to examine other times, to imagine Napoleon or
Alexander
and the worlds in which they walked. You are one of those, my Jillian, perhaps a talent . . .or a curse. . .you inherited from me.”

All this made her mind whirl. She stared,
mesmerized
at the lights that flashed throughout the room. “All I asked was
for
a little adventure.” She frowned, trying to think
things
through, “but then I’m not really ‘your’ Jillian, am I? No more than you’re actually my father. My dad was killed when my mother accidentally shot him when I was a baby.”

He looked distinctly uneasy. “Well,
to tell the truth
. .  .”

“Where is the Jillian of this time? Where am I? Or rather where is she?”

“In New Orleans with Philippe. He was severely injured during the battle.”

“
Philippe
?” her heart pounded with fear. “How bad is it? I must go to him.”

“He is not your Philippe, Jill. If you stood at his side, you would think you were looking at the man you loved. Your eyes would tell you this was truth, but after minutes, perhaps even days there would be differences. The chemistry between you would
n’t
exist because nature does
n’t
simply produce
replicates
. We are close copies of each other, but we are not the same. Life is more valuable than that. Each of us
is
unique as are the flakes in a snowstorm.”

“Then where is my Philippe?”

He hesitated as though ordering his thoughts. “Right now we are unable to connect with your reality. To speak in simple tones, it is though you exited, Jillian, and closed the door behind you. We are unable to enter.”

She got to her feet and strolled the length of the room, her gaze on the dancing lights. Slowly she walked back to the man who was the closest she had to a living father. He was watching her with close attention.

“I simply was there one minute and the next I was gone. I’d shot a soldier and was trying to rescue Philippe’s first mate. One step there and I came down back at home.”

He shook his head.  “You have confused things, Jillian. That was a controlled moment, we brought you here before you and the Jillian of this reality came together. We weren’t sure what kind of mischance such a meeting that would cause. What we didn’t count on, of course, that the
wrong
Philippe was there as well. The two of you had gone astray together.”

This conflicted with what he’d just told her, that the other Philippe was in New Orleans, not the man she’d married. He said first one thing and then another and couldn’t keep his story straight.

She tried to sort it out.
“So Philippe and me, the two of us together, sailed on the Belle Fleur and were married and landed in New Orleans.” She stood firmly
before
him.
“So when was it that I stepped out of my world and, as you say, closed the door behind me.”

“That’s easy.” Pale eyebrows, lighter than his hair, rose in response to her question. “When you left Port Isabel and stepped aboard the boat that took you to the Belle Fleur.”

Surprisingly this made sense. Ever since she’d stepped away from Port Isabel she had been caught in a sense of unreality, almost as though she walked through the pages of the history books she’d read at school.
The part that didn’t make sense was what he’d said about Philippe. They had sailed together, they had arrived in New Orleans at the same time. She remembered how protective he’d been at the ball. She would know when she saw him again whether Davis was lying or not.

She
pretended agreement
. “So we have two men missing in this world, Philippe and Jean
Lafitte
.”

“
Lafitte
? Is he important?”

“In my world he is considered to be significant
to
the Americans winning the battle of New Orleans.”

His eyes widened. “We must find him.”

“All I care about right now is getting to Philippe where he lies wounded in New Orleans and about to be receiving the attentions of a woman whom he will think is me. I b
e
g you, I demand of you that you use whatever means you have in this scientific miracle of yours,” she gestured to the machines, “to take me to him at once.”

He shook his head as though denying her request, but got to his feet and motioned her to follow him. He stepped to the center of the long room and waited for her to come to his side. The nearest machine was very close and he simply reached over and touched a long bar. Immediately the lights began to flash more frantically, sweeping long and dazzling around them and bringing with them a steady sweep of sound.

Lights and sounds engulfed them as she heard him say, “Unfortunately, Jill, there are other things we must do first.”

And then the room faded
from
around them.

Chapter Twenty
Three

The storm had come up late in the evening and now wind and rain ripped at the little cottage by the bay. Earlier in the day,
Owen
, in anticipation of bad weather, had sent his workers over to board
up
the windows , but he didn’t
this time
expect the storm to turn into the kind of damaging hurricane that would send them to the shelter of one of the
stronger
buildings in town.