James spent the following morning reading everything he had preserved from the Meridian. He had not opened Matthew's belongings for many months, but now he spread letters, charts, and his own damaged logbook across the desk of his London lodgings. The wreck returned to him in fragments: cold spray striking his face, a shouted bearing, the terrible sound of timber meeting rock. For two years he had replayed the orders he gave before the vessel grounded, always ending at the same point. The chronometer must have been wrong, and Edmund Whitcomb must have made it.
The official report identified W-17 as a compensating instrument provided through Wexford Maritime Supply. But in a personal letter written six weeks before the wreck, Matthew had complained of a sudden timekeeping error during warm weather. He described the protective brass cover as bearing a shallow crescent dent beside its hinge. James remembered seeing that dent himself when he checked the instrument on a calm afternoon, and he remembered his chief navigator saying the chronometer would be returned for adjustment at the next port. The inquiry's published description of W-17, however, called the cover undamaged and the fastening smooth.
James examined the photograph-like precision of the drawing Edmund had hidden in his watch. Its twin jewelled mounts could not have fitted the cheap single-bearing balance described by the inquiry's technical witness. Neither account could be complete if both referred to the same instrument. He took out his own notes, circled the differing descriptions, and rode directly to the duke's house before breakfast had ended.
Clara was waiting in a small sitting room near the servants' stairs. She had expected a messenger with a polite refusal, not the man whose evidence had shaped the worst year of her father's life. When James laid Matthew's letter beside the folded trial record, her hands trembled. "The cover in your brother's letter," she said. "My father would never have sent a chronometer in a case with a dent already on it. He signed each instrument only after the outside was finished."
"An instrument may be damaged during transport," James replied. "Yes," Clara said. "But a damaged case does not change a double jewelled regulator into a single one." He met her eyes and allowed the point to stand. It was the first conversation in two years in which Clara had offered a mechanical fact and been answered with another fact rather than a sneer.
They agreed to travel to Southampton and inspect the surviving workshop papers. The duke sent his secretary with them to provide an independent witness, and Mrs. Ames arranged a respectable older companion for Clara on the journey. James made it clear that he would not take custody of her father's watch without her permission. The promise seemed small, but Clara had grown accustomed to powerful people treating her possessions and opinions as things they could simply take.