Isaiah had not always worked in the weighing house.
As a boy he had learned woodworking beside his father, a skilled carpenter named Benjamin Bell.
Benjamin could judge a board’s strength by tapping it with a fingernail.
He taught Isaiah to measure twice because wood did not forgive a careless cut.
After Benjamin died, Silas Whitcomb transferred Isaiah to the weighing house and forbade him to enter the carpentry shed.
The prohibition had never made sense until Thomas Fenwick arrived.
Thomas brought unfamiliar tools and talked about cutting joints that would fit without nails.
He allowed Isaiah to watch him test a rotating wooden wheel.
For one afternoon they had spoken as two men who understood the same craft.
Then Curtis found them together and ended the conversation.
Thomas had never returned to the estate openly.
Isaiah remembered one detail from that afternoon.
Thomas had placed a small block on the table and asked Isaiah to feel its groove.
“The machine reads the shape,” Thomas said.
“A machine cannot read,” Isaiah replied.
“Not words, perhaps, but a shape can tell a machine what to do.”
Now Isaiah suspected that the six crates held parts of that invention.
He went to the carpentry shed under the pretense of collecting a replacement handle for the kitchen pump.
The shed smelled of shavings and oil.
An apprentice named Gideon worked at the bench under the eye of Mr. Pritchard, the estate carpenter.
Gideon was a thin seventeen-year-old with quick hands and a stubborn expression.
He had been forced to work there since childhood.
Pritchard went outside to inspect a broken gate.
Gideon slid a scrap of wood toward Isaiah.
“Does this look familiar?”
A curved groove crossed the scrap.
It matched the shape Isaiah remembered from Thomas’s demonstration.
“Where did you get it?”
“From the waste basket after Curtis visited.”
“Did Curtis bring more?”
“He brought a box full of pieces and told Pritchard to copy them.”
“Could he?”
“Not without the measurements.”
Isaiah ran his thumb along the groove.
“What happened?”
“Pritchard ruined three pieces and blamed me.”
Gideon showed a fresh bruise on his forearm.
“He said the buyer would arrive by Saturday.”
Isaiah looked toward the door.
“What buyer?”
“A man from the capital who wants a demonstration.”
“Who will demonstrate it?”
“Curtis says Mr. Whitcomb.”
Isaiah understood the danger.
Silas planned to claim Thomas’s invention and sell it as his own.
If Thomas refused to cooperate, Curtis would need someone else who understood the machine.
Isaiah could copy a shape, but he could not explain the invention’s full operation.
Lenora might believe he could.
Gideon leaned closer.
“There is something else.”
He opened a drawer and produced a broken wooden tooth.
“Someone carved a letter into this.”
Isaiah turned it in the light.
The letter was an F.
Under it were three shallow marks.
“Thomas made that,” Isaiah said.
Gideon nodded.
“I thought so.”
“Do not show it to anyone.”
“I already showed it to the wrong person.”
Isaiah looked up sharply.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Whitcomb.”
