At eleven the first of the townspeople began to gather in the street below for the noon check, the way they had every day of the trial, and Maren looked out of the tower window and counted them. Fewer than yesterday. She counted again, carefully, the way you count something you do not want to be true. Yesterday there had been near forty. Today there were perhaps twenty-five, and among them she did not see two of the councilmen who had come every day before, and she saw, instead, two men she recognized as Fallon's canvassers, standing at the edge of the crowd with the petition board under one arm, talking quietly to whoever would listen.
"The editorial worked," she said.
"Some," Soren said, standing beside her at the window. "Not all. Look at who stayed."
She looked. The miller's wife was there, with her daughter. The schoolteacher was there. The depot agent was already at his post by the town hall door, his watch chain across his waistcoat, his face set in the patient expression of a man who has decided to be a fact rather than an argument. And there were others, people whose names she knew now the way you know the names of neighbors: the woman who kept the boarding house, the farrier, the old man who swept the street. Twenty-five people is not a crowd, she thought, but it is a town, if you count it honestly.
"Noon will tell," she said.
"Noon always tells," Soren said.
They went down at half past eleven and opened the case, and Maren made the small adjustment she had been planning all morning. The rating nut on the pendulum needed a fraction of a turn; the clock had been gaining a breath against railroad time, not enough for anyone to notice except a clockmaker, but enough that honesty required correcting it. She did it herself, with her father's smallest screwdriver, her right hand steady, her left hand braced against the case, Soren standing behind her with his hands at his sides, saying nothing, because there was nothing to say and everything to witness. The nut moved a fraction. The pendulum's swing settled. She stepped back and wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Soren, and he nodded once, and she understood that he had just watched her take back a piece of herself, and that he was proud of her in the plain, unadorned way that carpenters are proud of sound work.
Then she did something she had not planned. She turned to the people gathered in the vestibule and in the street beyond the door, and she spoke, not loudly, but clearly enough to carry.
"You have read," she said, "that this trial is a performance, and that the log can be written any way we like. So I will make it harder for us, not easier. From this noon forward, the case will be locked between checks, and the key will be held by the council chairman, not by me and not by Mr. Krogh. No hand will touch the movement between noon and noon except in this room, in front of witnesses, the way it was done just now. If the clock is rigged, a locked case will prove it. If it is true, a locked case will prove that, too."
There was a silence. Then the depot agent, who had said almost nothing during the entire trial, cleared his throat and said, "I will initial each check myself, and I will keep my own record at the depot, separate from this log. Anyone who doubts either book may compare them."
And the schoolteacher said, "I will initial it too, when I am here," and the miller's wife said, "And I," and one by one, in the small, unremarkable way that towns decide things, the people in the vestibule offered themselves as witnesses, not because Maren had persuaded them with a speech, but because she had given them something harder than a speech: a test with a locked door on it.
Fallon's canvassers said nothing. They wrote something on their board and walked away down the street, and Maren watched them go, and felt the peculiar calm that comes after you have done the one honest thing available to you and must now wait to see whether honesty is enough.