The Bones and the Bell Tower

London, 1888. Coroner's clerk Ada Whitlock is called to catalogue a discovery in a collapsed bell tower: thirty-one bodies, not piled but seated, facing east, hands linked. It is not a burial. It is an arrangement. Ada recognizes the pattern from a story her grandmother told her — a village that paid for its harvests with children. Her brother was sent to Saint Ives Foundling Hospital at six. Officially, he drowned. The bones disagree. As Ada pulls the hospital's records apart, the same arrangement begins appearing in her own rooms. A thimble. A spoon. A hairpin. All facing east. A horror mystery of Victorian London, of paperwork that outlives people, and of a queue that has been forming for two hundred years.