The chairman turned a page. "Sir Lionel, where is the original movement removed from the case?" Sir Lionel said that he could not recall. "Then where are the records authorizing its replacement?" No answer followed. A further review of company payments showed that money saved by using inferior components had passed through an account connected to one of Sir Lionel's private agents. The committee ordered those records preserved and recommended that the original findings against Edmund Whitcomb be reconsidered in full.
It was not the dramatic victory Clara had once imagined. No officer rose to announce that her father had been perfectly innocent of every possible error, and Sir Lionel was not carried away in chains. The room remained full of unanswered questions about the grounding of the Meridian, the decisions made aboard her, and the wider practices of Wexford Maritime Supply. But a formal correction was entered: the instrument blamed on Edmund had not been shown to be the one he manufactured. The accusations that he knowingly supplied defective work no longer had a foundation in the evidence.
Weeks later, the Admiralty issued a notice recording the substituted movement and withdrawing its earlier censure of Edmund's workmanship. A separate investigation into Sir Lionel's contracts began, and his firm lost the right to supply further instruments while its accounts were examined. His creditors grew less patient, and his social friends suddenly discovered pressing engagements elsewhere. Clara took no pleasure in the thought of his humiliation. She had seen enough of people losing everything to understand that justice was not the same as delight in another person's fall.
Lady Beatrice called on Clara one afternoon, carrying her ivory fan but not opening it. She stood awkwardly in Mrs. Ames's sitting room and admitted that the laughter in the library had been cruel. Clara listened without relieving her of the discomfort. "I thought I knew what sort of person you were," Lady Beatrice said. "I had never considered that I might simply have been taught what to think." Clara replied, "Then perhaps you will ask before you laugh at the next person." The lady nodded and left quietly, having received no promise of friendship.
Clara returned to Southampton with a copy of the corrected notice folded inside the blue wool around the watch. The workshop still needed repairing, the debts still required negotiation, and her father's chair still stood empty. But the local printer had removed the old accusations from his display, and two former customers had sent orders for repairs. One widow brought a clock that had stopped on the morning her husband died and asked Clara to make it run again. Clara wound its spring, cleaned the clogged works, and returned it with an invoice bearing her own name.