That’s a working title.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
…Which took forever, not least because none of the bell towers agreed with each other. Jim was in fact certain that one of the damn things had chimed fourteen times. He wondered how long it would take the Restoration to change all the clocks back. It was probably low-priority for whatever committee was handling it. When you were trying to put a country back together, little things like irregular chiming probably didn’t loom very large. Even when the chiming was, to imitate the locals, bloody annoying.
A knock on his door pulled him out of his slightly put-upon reverie. “Come in!” Jim said, looking up. It was his secretary Doris, and he blinked at her slightly cringing expression. The locals weren’t supposed to look that scared anymore.
“Sir James? You have a visitor. From the Crown,” she added before Jim could remind her that he was not in fact a knight. “Major Alexandra Spencer. She needs to see you.”
“Did she say it was urgent?” Jim repressed a frown at Doris’s brief flicker of panic. “Even agents of the Crown are supposed to explain themselves, Doris. You don’t have to jump when the Restoration says ‘frog.’” Jim was proud at how he uttered that not-quite-a-lie with nary a bobble. After all, it wasn’t quite a lie. At least not in this office. Out in the wilds of post-occupation Britain, things were still a little more hierarchical.