There Never Was a Time

by Gail Link

"I WILL COME BACK FOR YOU."
Sitting along in her Vermont farmhouse, Rebecca Gallagher Fraser heard a ghostly voice whisper to her. But not until she stumbled across the same words in a distant ancestor's diary did they hold any meaning for her.

Drawn by inexplicable forces, Rebecca journeyed to the once resplendent Southern plantation where her forebear had loved and lost a Union soldier. And there, on a jasmine-scented New Orleans night, she discovered that passion unfulfilled in one lifetime could defy fate and logic and be reborn so much sweeter in another.

Genres: Time Travel, Historical Romance, Romance

438 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Gail Link is an award-winning author of both historical and contemporary romances. She’s also a part-time bookseller (what better place for a writer to work?) who loves musical theatre (especially Phantom of the Opera) and the movies.

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a time travel romance per se but an ok read.

[Tanya T · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not the greatest time travel romance i have ever read. In fact the female character never goes back in time,she just finds old an old diary of a distant relative and reads about her love story. Disappointed in this book for sure.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love it when a book brings me to tears, it shows I’ve not gone completely cynical after some of the tripe I’ve read over the years.

1860 New Orleans. Handsome bad boy Matthew Justin Devereaux of the most influential Louisiana Devereraux's is answerable to no one and caring less what others think of his actions until he meets and is instantly blindsided by Rachel Gallagher and she with him. Like Matthew Rachel falls hard and the reader is treated to their all-encompassing love for each other throughout the book. Blithely Rachel informs her mother that she doesn't care about Matthews’s reputation or the well-known fact that he keeps a mistress on Rampart Street. That is until two days later she meets the beautiful mistress in a shop and for a second she locks gazes with a shocked Matthew when he arrives to collect Dominique. Rachel is heartbroken, devastated remembering her carelessly uttered words. It matters, more than she ever dreamed. She cannot, will not share him and yet they barely know each other. Hours later Matthew breaks in on Rachel's mournful solitude still believing his private life can be separated from his burgeoning relationship with Rachel. He realises very quickly he must make a choice but the real threat does not come from his mistress, the Civil war is looming and Matthew is in deeper than he's letting on. He’s a spy for the other side and derided for his disloyalty in his home town. Rachel waits and waits, the months/years pass by and they meet only when Matthew is assured of her safety. At the foremost in his mind is the day he can return and make Rachel his wife.

"I will come back for you!"

Finally the news she most feared arrived in the person of one Captain Barrett Fraser, a lonely man who had befriended Rachel and her family over the last months. He informs her that Matthew was executed as a spy and to prove it she’s handed the ring she had made for Matthew that matches the locket she’s wearing. For a year she was barely functional in her grief but eventually her mother persuaded her it was time to look to the future – without Matthew and with Barrett.

I could see where this was heading and prayed it wasn’t so but alas. I’m in disbelief. Theirs is a consuming kind of love, the beyond the grave kind, the 'I'll wait forever for you' kind. It's the hopeless romantic in me that would have waited despite the return of the ring.

Rachel complies and they marry and move to Vermont and within a year she presents Barrett with a son. It is here she receives the devastating news that Matthew had in fact survived the war and returned for her - just as he'd promised.

Now readers are treated to Matthews POV and what happened to him during the war, its heartbreaking. Captured as a spy and kept in a holding room without light for months on end Matthew becomes a wreck of his former self, he becomes so ill he’s transferred to a hospital where he befriends a widowed nurse Julia Baker and even calls her his angel while he’s healing. Julia falls in love with Matthew but she knows it’s hopeless. The only name she’s heard on his lips, the one he’s cried out while in a fever was Rachel’s and she knows that thoughts of Rachel are the only thing that has sustained Matthew throughout his long months of captivity and hospitalisation. Other men would have given up but Matthew never once wavered in his desire to get back to Rachel and to their future together.

Damnit, yes I did shed a few tears. I have to take a breather.

Okay I’m back, somewhat composed. Throughout there are threads of the secondary story involving their descendants Rebecca Gallagher Fraser and Morgan Devereaux. I say secondary because the main focus is on the lost love between their great great grandparents. Rebecca has read Rachel’s journal professing a love for Matthew that had never waned and the deep heart ache of losing him forever. Intrigued Rebecca flies to Vermont and is instantly captivated by Morgan Devereaux and he with her and both are feeling that there’s something out of the ordinary that is pushing them together, a lost shattered memory of another time. Inevitably they spend some wonderful days together and nights (there’s no hot sex scenes in this book) it’s only hinted at. Rebecca gets cold feet and runs away. Morgan is shocked and confused until he finally reads Matthews journal, of his love for Rachel, his devastation and lasting grief that she hadn’t waited for him and his helplessness. Being a man of his word Matthew couldn’t fulfil his promise to return to Rachel, she was married to someone else, he had to let go. After a grief stricken year and at his mother’s urging Matthew began writing to Julia, another year followed and he invited her to the mansion and never left. While both Matthew and Rachel are content (don’t you hate that word?) in their marriages both admit in their private writings to there being times they imagined they were holding each other while in the arms of their respective spouses. I can only imagine how Barrett and Julia must have felt knowing what they knew yet settling for what they could get. What an absolutely crap deal all round.

Morgan realises Rebecca knew of their connection and his belief is solidified when he finds Rebecca’s locket with two pictures in it, of him and Rebecca. No, of Matthew and Rachel. Despite Rebecca pleading for time out Morgan is determined that history will not repeat itself, he won’t let it.

“Wait for me my love, I will come back to you.”

And finally...he did.

Wonderful heartrending story.

[Nicole alphAbet]

Summer Pile

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a fun romance that wove the past and the present.