"May I?" James asked, indicating the watch. Clara nodded, though her fingers tightened around the blue wool. He lifted the little gold case into his palm, opened the outer lid, and studied the exposed movement. For a moment he seemed merely interested; then he leaned toward the candlelight and turned the watch a fraction. Beneath a narrow polished bridge lay a tiny brass component with an irregular six-pointed wheel and two red jewels no larger than pinheads.
"Who altered this balance?" he asked. "No one," Clara replied. "My father fitted it himself, seven years ago." James swallowed. He had seen a drawing of precisely that assembly in an Admiralty report, a drawing that had been dismissed as an impossible design invented after the fact by a disgraced maker. Now it was running steadily beneath his thumb, its teeth catching light with each measured turn.
"Your father could not have made this seven years ago," Sir Lionel said quickly. "The compensation system was developed much later. Perhaps your memory has failed you." Clara did not answer him. She watched James's eyes, hoping he would notice what her father had trusted an honest observer to find.
James raised the watch almost to his own eye. The sixth tooth on the small regulator wheel had been cut in an unusual double curve, a feature no sensible manufacturer would introduce without a purpose. It matched the sketch James remembered from the file he had read the winter after the Meridian was lost. The file had attributed the sketch to Sir Lionel's engineering department. But the watch's casing bore a date engraved along its inner rim: 1810.
"That engraving can be forged," someone murmured. "Of course it can," James said, without looking away. "Which is why I intend to discover whether the mechanism can be forged as well." He shut the lid gently and held the watch toward Clara. In the silence, it ticked loud enough for those nearest the table to hear.
Clara did not take it immediately. "There is another lid, Captain. Under the movement. My father said you must look beneath the thing everyone is shown." James's expression changed again, this time from astonishment to something close to dread. Across the table, Sir Lionel took a step forward and held out his hand.
"Allow me to examine it," Sir Lionel said. "I am the qualified supplier here." James placed his free hand over the watch instead. "Not yet." The duke, who had been watching from a high-backed chair beside the fire, spoke for the first time. "Then perhaps this exhibition has become more instructive than I expected. Captain, Miss Whitcomb, please tell us what we are looking at."
Clara wanted to explain everything at once, but she had learned what happened when a frightened young woman spoke too quickly in a room full of influential men. She looked at the captain instead. "If I am wrong," she said, "you may say so before them all. But if I am right, I want my father's name spoken here with the same certainty they used when they destroyed it." James looked down at the watch and understood that a much older evening was about to be called into question.