A Time to Love (Kindle and ePub)

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Book 3 in The Time Travel Journals of Sahara Aldridge

For a Time Traveler, the Future is Never Guaranteed.

Sahara Aldridge, a young Egyptologist in 1922,is mastering the genetic surprise of time travel.

She’s survived a murderous vizier in King Tut’s Egypt, and taken on ancient Roman aristocrats bent on deposing Nero.

She’s even managed to open her heart to the charming Jack Moretti, despite the shocking secret he’s finally divulged.

But when the next clue to finding her parents lands her in an ancient Egyptian assassination attempt, Sahara’s tinkering with the past just might erase her future.

Skimming across the lofty pyramids of ancient Egypt to the elegant canals of 18th century Venice, the answers to Sahara’s desperate search for belonging seem only a breath away.

But an old score must be settled, and an old feud reconciled, before she can face a truth more than thirty years in the making, and a secret she was never meant to learn.

How can love be enough, when fear and hate are fierce?

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“How do I even begin? I cannot do justice to the adventure, suspense, and romance that Ms. Higley has written. These books have cost me sleep. I have been sitting on the edge of my seat today as I finished reading the last pages of this book. I love all of the characters and the settings...WOW!”

“An amazing conclusion to this story of Sahara and Jack!! Wouldn't you love to be a time-traveler? It would be so amazing!!”

“Time travel, intrigue, glimpses into ancient lives and times, murder and, yes, romance; this book/series has it all!”

“Absolutely fell in love with this story and the many plot twists.”

“I could not put this book down. I was drawn in by the excellent wordsmithing, incredible story lines, continued character development, historical detail and high adventure. My heart was touched by the level of forgiveness and restoration that happens between certain characters at the end of the book.”

“Tracy Higley brilliantly pulls all the pieces from the Time Travel Journals of Sahara Aldridge series together in this final book.”

“I've liked Higley's writing for years, but she's outdone herself with these newest additions to her writing. These definitely fall in the category of those books that I won't be forgetting any time soon, and I'm so glad they were written!”

“A truly enchanting, compelling series! The intrigue is intricately woven. If you love history and anthropology this series is for you!”

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***NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD!***

PLEASE READ A TIME TO SEEK BEFORE READING THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT!

Enjoy a sample from A Time To Love

PROLOGUE

September 2021

We are here again, you and I.

At the start of this, the final stretch of our journey through the past.

Not all memories are good. But then, as I have learned, not all memories are true, either.

One must unearth the treasures of memory, out of the sands of time. Sift away the inconsequential. Brush off the gritty, clinging falseness.

But even then—even then, there is deciphering, interpreting, assigning meaning.

And in all these actions, we have no guarantee that we do not err.

So yes, the past. Fragmentary and illusive, perhaps unknowable as it truly happened.

And the future, also unknowable.

For a woman who craves answers, unknowable presents a problem.

But perhaps the problem is, in itself, a type of answer. To come face-to-face with one’s own insufficiency. To realize that the Story being told—both my own and the greater Story in which every person plays a role—are not of my own making. Are not of my own knowing.

Can there be freedom in this?

Yes.

I have seen too much of the history of the world, of the people of the world, of the drama of the world, to believe in randomness or meaninglessness.

Even in this, my story, you will see. All the threads weave together. All the broken fragments fit. All the story-bits have a purpose. Even if we cannot always know.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

First, we must finish the story.

CHAPTER ONE

December 12, 1922

Venice, Italy

Venice, City of Water.

Jack and I surveyed the interior of the Santa Lucia Train Station, a squat building built like a tunnel, with most of the crowds moving to our right.

I pointed to the east. “City is that way, I believe.”

Jack nodded and followed, uncharacteristically silent.

But after his revelation last night, our usual banter would have been ill-timed.

The year 2002. That’s where I came from.

Jack’s announcement, given over coffee as though nothing more than a bit of interesting backstory, rocked me.

But that number—2002—it lodged in my mind like a pebble. A constant, painful pressure I was trying to ignore.

Better to focus on our goal here. Find traces of my parents in the early 1800s, when they’d come to Venice for “the Great Belzoni.” Giovanni Battista Belzoni, circus strongman and discoverer of Egyptian tombs, was somehow connected to their disappearance, though I’d yet to figure out how.

Our arrival in Venice coincided with the arrival of rain, and in a repeat of our entrance into Rome a few days ago, we stored our luggage and emerged from the station into a gray mist.

Across a paved lot, the Grande Canal snaked in both directions, a greenish highway through the tiny city. A lineup of vaporetti idled in the canal, waiting to ferry passengers across. On the other side, clusters of gondolas docked in front of the green-patina dome of a church. To our left, a footbridge spanned the waterway. The city smelled of water and fish, not unpleasant.

“Shall we grab a taxi?” Jack searched along the canal.

I squinted up at him. “For having Italian roots, you don’t know much about Venice. No automobiles allowed. The Grande Canal winds through the city, with lots of smaller canals intersecting. That’s their road system.” I pointed to a vaporetto. “There’s our taxi.”

Minutes later, we mingled with a dozen other travelers across the canal in Santa Croce, one of Venice’s six districts.

“I’m assuming you’ll want to buy a map?” Jack’s half-smile seemed an attempt at camaraderie.

I scanned the close-fitting streets. “We need more than a map. A guidebook, if we’re going to figure out how and where to search for my family, more than a hundred years in the past.”

We soon stumbled across a tourist shop selling guides, then ducked into a tiny cafe nearby, book in hand.

I skirted tables to an iron-legged one in the back and started skimming the contents of our purchase.

Jack joined me minutes later with a tray of Italian chocolate brioche and two steaming cappuccinos.

I breathed in the scent of coffee and flashed him a look of gratitude. I’d eaten little in the past two days, and Jack knew my fondness for pastry.

“Well?” He sank into a chair beside me, too close. “Figure anything out yet?”

“It’s been three minutes.”

“Right. What’s taking so long?”

I sighed and looked away. Perhaps we would resume our light-hearted relationship, despite the eighty-year age difference and the impossibility of anything serious between us.

If Jack wanted casual, what else was there?

“I guess hunger slowed me down.” I reached for the brioche and took a hearty bite. But the flaky layers tasted like dust.

Jack let me study the guidebook in silence, though his hand on the tabletop strayed uncomfortably close to mine on several occasions.

By the time I drained my cup of cappuccino and reduced the brioche to crumbs, I had a plan.

“Here.” I pointed to the map in the guidebook’s flyleaf. “The next district over, San Polo.”

Jack leaned over the book, his head brushing my cheek.

I pulled back and tapped a tiny square. “Where it says Campo dei Frari, that’s where we’re headed. To the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.”

“My Italian’s pretty rudimentary, but I guess that’s the State Archives?”

“Right. The book says they established it in 1815. It’s our best shot of finding records of my family here during that time. And of Giovanni Belzoni.”

“So do we ride a gondola over there, or what?”

“We’re not tourists, Jack. We’re researchers.”

“Got it. So no gondola at all?”

“We’ll see.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin and stood. “But the State Archives are about a half-kilometer away. I think we can walk it.”

“Fine, but if you think I came all the way to Venice to skip seeing the sights…”

“Understood. But first, we research.”

Using the map in the front of the book, it took only twenty minutes to navigate to the Campo dei Frari.

Jack kept to my heels the entire time, giving me a chance to think, to reorient myself to the new reality.

I had seen my parents. And my sister. Truly seen them. They lived. Persia existed.

And then I lost them once again, watched them disappear in a strange, time-frozen moment I did not understand, when my sister and I  locked eyes and then were snatched apart.

And my parents… even from that briefest of glances, I could see they had aged. So it would seem the same seventeen years had passed for them. I hadn’t intersected them somewhere in their past. But of course, Persia’s existence and her age told me that.

I tried once more to push away the other overwhelming new piece of information.

Jack. From the Philadelphia of 2002, not 1922.

Perhaps in another fifty years, as a hunched-back woman in her eighties, I could peek in on baby Jack in his nursery. But that would be the closest we could come to a life together.

All the more reason this Venetian search for my parents must yield results. I clung to this slim chance to find them, before Jack returned to his own time and left me utterly alone.

The Archivio di Stato began as a Franciscan monastery, according to the book, and the pinkish stone and three-sided courtyard lined with stone arches did not disappoint. We passed under various sculptures of winged angels, long-bearded saints, and monks with kind faces and extended hands. Hopefully, those inside would be as welcoming.

I approached a spectacled woman typing at a front desk.

She continued her key-pounding for a few moments, then widened her eyes to peer over her glasses without lifting her head.

“Ciao.” I tried for a friendly smile. “I—we—were hoping to examine some archives from the early 1800s. I’m looking for records of my family whom I believed—”

“Parli Italiano?”

“No. No, I’m sorry. English only.” Well, also Arabic, but that seemed of little help.

She sighed, a deep and affected huff of frustration, then pushed away from her desk, held up a finger and disappeared into a windowless office to our right.

Moments later she reemerged, a diminutive man trailing. “Signor De Luca,” she said, then reclaimed her seat to resume attacking the typewriter keys.

He squinted, rubbed at a full mustache, and tilted his head. “Yes? You need?”

I tried again. “I’m looking for records of my family. I believed they lived here in the early 1800s.”

“Ah, yes, of course.” He held out a hand, heavy with rings. “Your application form?”

I glanced at Jack and bit my lip. “We don’t have an application. We came—unexpectedly.”

“No application?”

“No.”

Jack nudged around me. “We’re on our honeymoon in your wonderful city, actually.” He gave the man a conspiratorial grin. “And my bride’s just discovered she has Venetian ancestors.” He wrapped an arm around me. “It would be the highlight of our trip to have a few minutes to search them out.”

Signor De Luca’s pencil-thin eyebrows lifted into tiny points of horror. “‘Search them out’? But no, no, this is not possible. You must make request, fill out form, wait in Study Room for archivist to bring you records.”

Despite my best intentions, my eyes welled with tears. Another delay, when I was perhaps so close. I dared hope that even by the end of today, I would walk nineteenth century canals of Venice with my parents and sister.

The man’s glance flicked to me. A note of surprise crossed his face.

“Oh, but signora, you must not cry.” His hands fluttered at his chest. “No, we cannot have the tears.”

I breathed and blinked, but only succeeded in spilling the tears down my cheeks.

Beside me, Jack shook his head. “I’m so sorry, darling. I know how much it meant to you—”

“Come, come. Prego.” De Luca extended a hand. “Today is quiet. You wait in the Study Room. Tell Allesandro what you need.”

Jack’s arm, still around my waist, hugged me to him and then released.

We trotted after the man into the Study Room, passing under an enormous doorway into a cavernous and silent corridor of a room, the ribbed-vault ceiling in the Gothic style looming far above. Massive stone columns lined the center, with rickety wooden tables pushed against both sides.

“Allesandro!” Our guide waved a younger man over. “You must help signora find her family.”

Allesandro glanced between us. “She has no application?”

De Luca beamed a beneficent smile over me and winked at Jack. “Today we do this for love, eh?”

I clutched his hand. “Gracias, Signor. Gracias.”

He disappeared, and I gave Allesandro all the information I had, while he scribbled with a blunt pencil in a palm-sized notebook. My “ancestors,” I told him, Renae and Alexander Aldridge, were most likely residing in Venice around 1814, with a daughter born to them at the time, whose name I believed to be Persia.

He held out the notebook for me to check his spelling, which was surprisingly accurate.

“I know it’s not much to work with. They may have been associated with Giovanni Battista Belzoni.”

Allesandro’s lips parted. “The Great Belzoni?”

“Yes! You know of him?”

“But of course.” He bowed. “You will wait. I will find them.”

Jack and I wandered the Study Room while we waited, examining the architecture and the more general public records in shelves along the walls.

Toward the back of our tour, Jack intertwined his fingers into mine.

He shrugged at my expression. “Just playing the part of honeymooners. Wouldn’t want them to get suspicious.”

I kept my hand in his. So help me, he was making it difficult to keep my distance.

Minutes ticked into an hour, and still no Allesandro.

When he finally reentered the Study Room, he wore the expression of a doctor bringing bad news to a waiting family.

He crossed to where we stood beside one of the scratched wooden tables, then shook his head.

“Nothing, signora. I have found nothing of these Aldridges. No birth records, no death records. All of last century I searched.” He tut-tutted as though the missing information were an errant child. “Perhaps records have gone astray.” He lifted sad eyes. “Or perhaps they were never here.”

I inhaled against my last chance slipping away. What did I know of their time here? Only my mother’s journal page, found crumpled in the back of a drawer by my friend, Eve. A page which mentioned traveling to see Belzoni, but not having seen him. Perhaps whatever happened to rip them from my life happened before they ever reached Venice.

“And Belzoni?” I glanced toward the door of the Study Room. I would love to search those records myself. “You know when he was here?”

“Yes, yes. Only a short time, after he came here from Padua. In 1814, then leaving in 1815 for Egypt, to begin his stupendous work there.”

Stupendous. Or “destructive,” as my mother had called it.

Allesandro circled the two of us and extended a hand toward the doorway, a clear signal. “You have my hardest effort, signora, searching for your family in all the years around Belzoni’s time here in Venice. But I have nothing.”

Jack pressed a hand against the small of my back to guide me toward the exit.

I arched away from his hand and held my ground. One could always ask more questions.

“What about other writings? Not just birth and death records, but perhaps academic works? Might there be mention—”

But Allesandro was smiling and shaking his head. “Ah, signora, that would take perhaps weeks of research. And with no application…”

“Right.”

Too bad I couldn’t travel back to a few months ago and send this guy an application. Though I suspected without the credentials of a university behind me, even an application would yield little.

“Come on, Sahara.” Jack’s words were quiet. Kind. “Let’s leave this man to his work.”

Another closed door.

This time, I held the tears at bay. Crying was as pointless a reaction as adding a few drops of water to the city’s canals.