Page 108 of In the Pursuit of Haven
“Roxy!” he shouted. “This way, honey!”
Not a problem! I was almost halfway through the shaft and following the light at the end of the tunnel like it held my salvation. Shouting out, I clawed for the surface. The ring I held escaped my grip and rolled across the dirt and rock above ground.
Jessie swept it aside to get to me. My arm followed next. His strong grip found me and he dragged me the rest of the way through.
I held tightly to him while he hugged me. I couldn’t get a word out, I was breathing so hard. “You’re safe.” He moved my hair from my eyes and sneaked a kiss against my cheek, sending happy shocks of electricity tingling all through me. “Let’s not do that again,” he whispered against my cheek. He followed that with another kiss and another.
A happy laugh tumbled from my lips. Processing that I’d just defeated my fear of everything gross and crawly made it hard to concentrate on a treasure that could change our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine.
My eyes veered to the ring that had landed against a tuft of grass. Okay, maybe it wasn’tthathard to focus. I reached past Jessie’s leg and plucked up the ring. Written across the top was the inscription, “Hannah.”
This wasn’t the Relic. There was no sign of a snake. My stomach sank. It was another clue.
“Who’s Hannah?” I asked.
Jessie was already on it, searching “Hannah” on his phone. “Zerub’s daughter,” he murmured under his breath. “She was one of the daughters who inherited the island.”
I glanced over his shoulder and saw he’d found her gravestone on his phone. Her name was engraved over the top of an arched stone in exactly the same way it was etched into this ring.
She was buried in Mount Holly Friends’ Cemetery.
“She was a Quaker!” I blurted in disbelief.
Her grandfather was the Hammer of the Quakers. He would’ve been outraged! Weaving through Jessie’s arms, I took over his phone to get more gossip from the Find a Grave site. “She married Edward Gaskill!”
Jessie watched me with lips tilting upwards. Had no idea how crazy this was.
“His parents were Samuel Gaskill and Provided Southwick,” I tried to explain. Nope, no recognition passed over his face. I whistled low as I scrolled through his phone. “Anyway, those are famous names in the Quaker world.”
“How’s that?”
“Let’s just say that Hannah’s grandfather killed her husband’s grandparents and tried to sell his mother into slavery!”
“You see?” Jessie said with a wink. “Your aunt Haven only hated me. We’ve got nothing on them.”
My cheeks burned at the reminder. Anyway, this was like major Romeo and Juliet stuff. How did Hannah and Edward ever hit it off?
“Hark!” A handsome man tipped his broad-brimmed countryman’s hat at me. “Doth mine eyes deceive me or didst an angel fall from the heavens?”
I startled, watching the man that my uh… eccentric (but-learned-for-the-times) father had warned me to avoid at all costs. “Are-are ye not a Quaker?” asked I.
“Aye, lass, and thou shalt be my future wife.”
Jessie had no idea why I was smiling to myself like a dopey romance author. I snuggled against his chest.
“I still don’t get how Hannah and Edward got together,” I breathed out. This man must’ve really lived his religion of forgiveness and peace.
“Maybe he was rich.”Or that.Jessie was less of a romantic than I was.
I glared at him for ruining my dreams and, resting my head against his arm, scanned through the page to see that Edward had moved to New Jersey to make a better life for himself (and possibly to escape the Puritans); he’d bought a farm there before taking his earnings from it to buy more property. Then he’d returned to Salem to find his wife.
“Yeah, he was rich,” I confirmed,extremelyreluctantly, “and just a few years earlier, the Toleration Act of 1689 was passed in Britain, which meant that Quakers were no longer considered criminals, and…” I decided to type her name along with “blue piece of glass” into his internet. My stomach twisted with eagerness when her dowry came up in the search results. I let out a yelp. “Ah ha! Her stepmother put the glass in Hannah’s dowry! Right here!”
My scraped fingers shook over my phone when I shoved the screen into his stomach. “It says, ‘one kine, a frothy, a pin tucked night-rail, one feather paillasse, an ell of needlepoint lace, ivory comb, a pomander… and a blue cut glass heirloom from Hispaniola.’”
Our Quaker “Romeo and Juliet” were our Shepherds! They had the Relic, so how long was it in their possession?
I followed their married life in the article that I’d found on her dowry, trying to explain to Jessie as I went—the newlyweds stayed four years in Salem, had a son named Joseph here, then returned to New Jersey to Edward’s farm—he had twenty-three acres in Mt. Holly, where they proceeded to build a dam, open grist mills, saw mills, fulling mills, paper mills…yeah, all the mills.
