Three nights later, a stone broke the remaining pane in the Whitcomb workshop window. Nothing was stolen, but the cabinets had been forced and several papers scattered across the floor. The watch had been with Clara in London, and the duke's secretary had already taken the most important pages to be copied by a solicitor. The damage frightened her less than the message it carried: someone knew she was still searching. James urged her to remain with Mrs. Ames while he investigated, and Clara agreed only after he promised she would continue to take part in every decision concerning her father's work.
The next lead came from a woman whom none of the gentlemen had thought to question. Mrs. Hester Lane had cleaned the Wexford office for eleven years, and she remembered the night a junior clerk was instructed to copy a batch of green-ink entries after normal working hours. She had watched him struggle with a cold fire and a candle that would not stay lit. When he left, he forgot a single loose page under the blotter, and Mrs. Lane put it aside because the ink had marked her cleaning cloth. She had kept the page with other odd scraps in a kitchen drawer, never imagining anyone might want it.
The page listed the original W-17 movement as removed from its casing and placed in private storage. Beneath it appeared another entry for a replacement assembly bought from a manufacturer whose work was known to be cheaper and less exact. The two entries carried the same destination and the same outward serial mark. Most damning of all, the cost difference had been entered as a payment to a private account rather than returned to the Admiralty. Hester could not testify to why the exchange occurred, but she could say who gave the instructions and what she had found.
James brought the page to Arthur Pritchard, who was now living quietly in Greenwich after leaving government service. Pritchard had become an old man with stiff hands, but the moment he saw the watch his expression brightened with professional recognition. He insisted on testing its motion over several hours before answering a single question. At the end of the afternoon, he compared it with his surviving notes and pronounced the regulator the same kind Edmund had submitted for trial. Then he confirmed that the signed slip hidden beneath the watch's movement contained figures in his own handwriting.
"I thought they had destroyed these records," Pritchard said. "I warned your father that the instrument could be changed after it left my bench, and he asked me to sign a second copy of the results. He hid it because neither of us trusted the company storehouse. I should have come forward when they blamed him." Clara watched his shaking hands rest on the table. "You still can," she answered. "He is gone, but the people who believed him remain."