The Hollow Pulse of Whitehall

“The queen has been dead for four months, and she breathes thanks to a clockmaker. Someone has decided what time she stops.”

Beneath Whitehall, on the banks of the Thames, clockmaker Silas Crane keeps the brass chest of a queen four months dead rising and falling, so that the court and the ambassadors believe she is asleep. The Secret Ordinance punishes any tremor in the velvet with the purge of the crypt, and Lord Protector Hector Vosper needs a vigorous pulse to secure a war loan. When a drop of oil exposes the edict the mechanical hand has just signed against the stevedores of the Lower Thames, and someone deliberately files down the machine's heart, Silas, his old master Varley and Inspector Ada Moss discover that the deception has an expiry hour.