Clara had imagined confronting the apprentice many times. In those imaginings she had demanded an apology and found satisfaction in watching him struggle. Standing before him now, she felt mostly the terrible waste of his silence. "You knew they changed it," she said. "And you let my father die thinking he could never prove it." Thomas nodded, tears gathering in his eyes. He did not ask forgiveness.
James stepped beside Clara, not between her and the man. "Will you make a sworn statement?" he asked. Thomas looked at his hands. "If it will help put his name right, yes. Whatever happens to me." The duke's secretary took out his notebook at once. Clara turned away toward the workshop window, grateful that nobody expected her to speak gently yet.
Thomas then described a second set of books kept at Wexford's warehouse near the docks. He remembered the first and last letters of a clerk's name and the way deliveries were entered in green ink rather than black. The duke's secretary wrote every detail down. James knew such recollections could be challenged, but they offered a direction for an investigation instead of another plea for sympathy.
Before they left, Clara took her father's pocket watch from its wool wrapping and wound it with the careful half turns he had taught her. Thomas listened to the soft, measured ticking. "I remember him working on that," he said. "He told me it was made to show his daughter that the finest mechanism in the room need not be the largest." Clara did not look at him. "He said many things worth remembering," she answered.
On the long road back to London, between changes of horses, James finally spoke of the moment he had been most ashamed to remember. After the wreck, he had been asked whether the faulty instrument contributed to the vessel's position. He had said yes, because he believed the figures placed before him and because finding a mechanical fault seemed easier than accepting that no captain could save every man in a storm. He had not intended to condemn an innocent maker. But intention, he now understood, did not alter what his testimony had done.
"I will not ask you to forgive me for believing the report," he told Clara. "I ask only that you allow me to correct my evidence publicly when we know what happened." Clara watched the bare trees pass beyond the carriage window. "My father would have liked you," she said at last. "That makes it harder, not easier. He always thought an honest mistake could be repaired. He did not live to see whether this one would be." James accepted the words without defense.
Their first request for access to the warehouse ledgers was refused. The company clerk told the duke's secretary that the books had been sent away for binding, although the shelves behind him appeared full. James requested the records through a naval contact and received an answer that the matter had been closed. Sir Lionel's influence, Clara realized, worked less like a locked door than a hallway filled with doors that never quite opened.