Time means nothing to 

             star-crossed lovers.

Today, I’m featuring a story by a fellow member of the Pink Fuzzy Slipper Writers.  SOMEWHERE MY LOVE by Beth Trissel.

Let me start off by saying I don’t like Time-travel stories...they just seem so futile.  I do like Somewhere My Love, however so I’m contradicting myself and that’s what makes Life so wonderful--its little contradictions.

British-born Julia Morrow has found herself a dream job, working as a summer guide at Foxleigh, a stately plantation in historic Virginia.  Immediately, she has a sense of familiarity about the place, especially the portrait of Cole Wentworth, the tragic heir who was murdered in his bedchamber some two centuries before.  This feeling is further compounded when she meets William, the current manager of Foxleigh who is Cole’s double.  It isn’t long before both William and Julia are experiencing the first stirrings of attraction and love, and the odd sensation that they’ve been through that emotion before.  Julia comes to believe she and William are tied to the original star-crossed lovers Cole and Julia Maury, and the dreams she has of incidents in their lives confuse and worry her.  William’s a little more practical about the whole thing; he thinks it’s merely Julia’s romantic imagination and the atmosphere the plantation itself exudes.  Having given up his law practice to manage the plantation, he’s accustomed to women’s attention because of his resemblance to Cole.  In fact, he’s even let the rumor about that he’s gay so he’ll be left alone but when he meets Julia, however, he squashes that idea fast. Before he can becomes serious, Fate adds a third player to the cast. With the arrival of Lyle McChesney, an out-of-work Australian hired as a handiman, there’s now a rival for Julia’s affection.  

When William’s grandmother decides to produce Hamlet as the plantation’s annual Shakespearean play, with William as the melancholy prince, Lyle as Laertes, and Julia as Ophelia, the story reels to its climax in a duel with real swords instead of tipped foils. With a deft counterpointing of the action, the author allows the drama onstage to play itself out paralleling the relationships between the three characters in the play, those in the present, and what happened in that fateful triangle in the past.  Suddenly, no one at Foxleigh is who they appear to be, but merely shadows of the souls they were in Cole and Julia’s world, and the mystery of the death of the heir to the plantation is discovered with devastating and surprising results.

Beth Trissel’s novel is the first in a series; read it and I guarantee it won’t be the only one you’ll read.