Page 66 of In the Pursuit of Haven
Again my mind shifted to Haven’s suspicions that her true love had been murdered. After Leon had been sent home, only one man had gone with Matthew to figure out the rest of this mystery. “Was it Robert?” I asked. “Is he your source?”
Jessie took a deep breath. “I think he might be.” He didn’t look happy about the prospect. “We’ll make him sorry if he is.” He ran a capable hand across the map that had literally been plucked from the seventeenth century. Like seriously! I’d been searching for a map like this that I’d been told didn’t exist.
Luther would kill for something like this.
The coastlines and surrounding islands that we’d been debating for years were all laid out in front of me. The earliest map of Salem that was this detailed was Bowditch’s map from 1806. I was losing track of our groundbreaking discoveries.
I turned the map over, reading the inscription in the fancy calligraphy they’d used back then:“Fix eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen else the fire of betrayal consume ye.”
There was the talk of fire again. Asher Crabb had been very deliberate when using this kind of figurative language. There had to be a better reason than just some curse.
I flipped the map back over to study the detailed geography.
“You want to know what nine means?” Jessie’s dark eyes rose to mine. Yeah, whoever Hunter had used as their source, it was a good one. My husband definitely wasn’t aware of these details only a few short months ago.
I nodded for him to go on.
“There are nine guardians of this treasure,” he said, “from all walks of life, and most of them? They hated each other, but they had one thing in common.”
“What?”
“They hated the British more. We already know that Phips and Crabb were as different as night and day. The pirate governor was known for his hot temper and finding shipwrecks, and Crabb was a diver, calculating and methodical. When they looted La Concepcion of its treasures that first time, sure, they made the British king and queen richer than they’d ever imagined, but the joke was on them, because Phips and Crabb left most of those riches behind… and they came back for it.”
I loved when Jessie talked this way. My heart skipped with excitement as he put together the pieces of the story that Luther had started. Jessie’s quick mind was one of his most attractive features, and I’d fallen hard when he’d first spun tales of his pirate ancestor.
“Why give the treasure to nine guardians?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t quite like that—Phips had a genius onboard they called the Lightmaker.”
“Lightmaker? Did he have an actual name?”
“Not that I know of, the Lightmaker was just this scientist from England, and he helped the pirates put together a way to hide the treasure from the British because… they were planning on using it against them.”
“You mean to fund an early revolutionary war?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said. “The colonists, at this point, were used to being left to their own devices for practically fifty years.”
I was familiar with this story—nineteen of those years of freedom were after the English Civil War, when the Puritans in Britain led a revolt to depose their king, leaving the colonies absolutely independent.
“When King Charles II came back with a vengeance,” Jessie said, “… andliterallya vengeance, because the Puritans had killed his father, he tried to clamp down on the independent colonies in the worst ways possible.”
He’d dissolved their charter, their bill of rights and appointed the unpopular Andros to be their governor… the first governor they hadn’t voted in themselves.
“And of course,” Jessie continued, “he put taxes on them, lots and lots of taxes. He wanted to use them as his new money machine.”
Those were called the Navigation Acts, and about seventy-five years later, those taxes had ignited the Revolutionary War. Phips and Crabb clearly hadn’t lived long enough for that. No, they’d died within years of the other. Strange to know what would’ve happened had they survived the aftermath of the witch trials.
“So the Lightmaker found items from this sunken ship and cobbled them together to give to nine guardians,” Jessie said.
“Shepherds of the Relics,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s just, I found that name on two of these clues, and Haven picked up on it too. She put it on her gravestone. The guardians call themselves Shepherds of the Relics.”
“You’ve been busy,” he said. He squeezed my hand. “Each of these… Shepherds were given a clue that would lead to the treasure.”
“A Relic,” I said.
