For the first time in Clara's life, her father came home unable to meet her eyes. Customers withdrew their orders; creditors who had once praised his craftsmanship demanded immediate payment. A newspaper called him the man who had sold sailors false certainty. The neighbors did not spit at the shop door or throw stones. They simply stopped entering, and Clara discovered that silence could ruin a business more efficiently than rage.
Edmund spent months writing careful letters, each one returned with official language and no promise of another examination. He believed W-17 had been exchanged for a cheaper imitation after its final trial, but he could not prove who had ordered it. One winter morning Clara found him seated beside the bench with the pocket watch open in front of him. "The truth is not lost," he told her. "It is only in the wrong hands. Never let them persuade you those are the same thing."
He died the following spring of a fever that weakened him too quickly for the doctor to understand. After the funeral, Clara found the watch wrapped in blue wool under the loose board beneath his chair. With it lay a small paper bearing the words, "Look beneath what they show you. Ask about the sixth tooth. Ask what was delivered, and what was carried aboard." At the bottom he had written: "For Clara, who knows the difference."
The watch had offered no explanation she could easily use. On its surface, it looked like a handsome but ordinary object, and the screws securing the inner cover were so minute that a stranger might damage the works by attempting to reach them. Clara knew how to open it without harm, but she was not allowed inside the institution that held the records she needed. Men who had ignored her father would not listen to a daughter who repaired clocks to buy bread.
Then an invitation reached her through Mrs. Ames, the duke's housekeeper, whose kitchen clock Edmund had repaired without charge during a difficult winter. The duke planned to show a collection of scientific objects at his London gathering, and one of the honored guests was Captain James Calder, the man whose testimony had helped condemn Edmund. The invitation was not addressed to Clara as a guest of rank. It asked her to bring examples of her father's work for the curious amusement of distinguished patrons. She understood the insult and accepted anyway.
"They will laugh," Mrs. Ames warned when Clara arrived in London carrying a small borrowed trunk. "They have been taught to laugh," Clara replied. "That is not the same as being right." She wore the cream gown her mother had once sewn for her eldest cousin, taken in at the waist and hemmed with patient stitches. There was no silver at her throat and no fashionable feather in her hair. Beneath the plain fabric she carried the blue-wrapped watch, and for the first time since her father's death she felt that his heartbeat had accompanied her into the room.