I had assumed the permanent Chancellorship of the Sovereign Admiralty Trust six months ago. The lingering grief of losing Robert, the sting of being mocked by an entitled boy on a motorcycle, and the heavy burden of forty years of family secrecy had completely metabolized into an un-shakeable, eighty-year architectural peace; my strength had completely returned, rooted in the bedrock of an un-broken command.
I wore an unadorned cream-colored linen work shirt, comfortable dark denim trousers with copper rivets, and clean leather gardening boots. My face was radiant, free of the quiet tension and domestic isolation that had shadowed my eyes when I walked the edges of my torn lawn.
Around my left wrist, resting easily against the rolled linen cuff, was Arthur Mercer Senior’s restored 1956 Admiralty Gold Chronometer, its mechanical second hand sweeping with that clean, rhythmic, sixty-cycle *tack… tack… tack* that had governed fifty years of honest labor.
