Chapter 18

Inside the carriage heading toward Buckingham Palace, Sir Clark’s footsteps still lingered beneath the carriage wheels. It was that kind of state where the body moves, but the mind remains trapped in yesterday’s meeting room. The human heart often fails to keep pace with the speed of the flesh, lingering for a long time at the place it left behind long after the body has moved elsewhere.

With the conscience and conviction of a physician, he had testified proudly before the Select Committee. He had appealed with all his heart how tragically laudanum destroys the human body and soul. Every single word was like blood drawn from his veins.

And yet, they say the drug’s effects might differ depending on race?

The moment he heard those words, it felt as though his lifelong convictions as a doctor had been insulted. His entire body trembled with rage, but there was nothing he could do right away. Proving scientifically that the claim was false would require years of experiments, and during that time, countless souls across the sea would vanish into smoke.

…And yet, to go visit Ann and Mary.

Before he left, Her Majesty the Queen had added a few brief words.

If those who had escaped the scourge of laudanum were brought before the Select Committee as witnesses to speak honestly of what they had experienced, and if their stories were widely publicized through the press, people would naturally shift their focus.

Would it really turn out like that?

The faces of the politicians he had met at the Select Committee floated into his mind. Men who dug traps within their words and draped sophistry dressed in logic with a sophisticated posture.

If Sir Clark was a doctor who had dedicated his whole life to saving people, they were the sort who could dance at a party even after casting people into the sulfurous fires of hell. Because to them, conscience was merely a coat to be swapped out as needed.

Against such men, what power could the stories of two nameless maidens wield? How could the low voices of housemaids reach the lofty ceiling of Westminster?

Yet it was a strange thing. Ever since hearing Her Majesty’s words, his mind had cleared up oddly. It was the sensation of a faint breeze blowing from beyond a wall that had seemed impossible. A premonition that could neither be explained by logic nor denied.

Alright… let’s actually go and see.

A small space of hope created by Her Majesty the Queen.
Thinking that perhaps he might discover a small spark there to bring those men down, he gazed at the growing outline of Kensington Palace.

As he stepped out of the carriage and drew closer to the palace, the lively chatter of children reached his ears.

At the clear and pure sound, incomparable to the filth of the political arena, a faint smile formed on Sir Clark’s lips of its own accord as he opened the door of the daycare center.

It was just after lunchtime. While the nannies were clearing away the dining table, the children were rolling around and playing on the carpet. And in one corner, familiar faces were eating pudding. The housemaids Ann and Mary. Their faces were entirely different from when he had first seen them a year ago. The pallor of those days, trapped in the shadow of laudanum, was gone, replaced instead by a tired yet warm vitality.

“Oh, Sir Clark!”

Spotting him, Ann cried out in delight, rising from her seat.

“What brings you here, Sir?”

“I dropped by for a moment. I was wondering how the children are doing.”

At Sir Clark’s words, Mary answered with a bright smile.

“Of course! You wouldn’t believe how well the children are growing. Look at this. Our Jack can stand all by himself now!”

When Mary put her hands under her son’s arms and helped him up, the child wobbled for a moment before firmly standing on his own feet. Adults generally forgot how dazzling the victory of a little hero, bravely facing the world’s gravity head-on for the first time, truly was.

“Well, well, indeed he is. He’s growing up very strong and healthy.”

Sir Clark smiled contentedly as he looked at the child’s flushed cheeks. Vibrant eyes, sturdy little soles of feet. There was an undeniable radiance to children raised in a good environment. That radiance was priceless, yet he knew all too well how small a dose of poison was enough to extinguish it.

“It’s all thanks to Sir Clark. If you hadn’t informed Her Majesty about the dangers of laudanum, a place like this would never have come to be.”

“What have I done? It is all thanks to Her Majesty’s grace.”

Sir Clark waved his hand and said modestly. At that moment, Ann’s expression hardened as if she had just remembered something, and she opened her mouth.

“…By the way, Sir Clark, I saw this morning’s newspaper.”

Her voice was laden with anger.

“I mean that committee business about laudanum or whatever it is. I was just so furious…”

Sir Clark looked at her in silence. A small fear stirred within him. If even the housemaids had read the paper and been persuaded by Viscount Palmerston’s sophistry, this war was practically lost.

“I mean, how can anyone say such a thing? From the perspective of a mother raising a child, that is absolute nonsense!”

Ann clenched both fists and raised her voice.

“That the effects of medicine differ depending on race? If that were true, shouldn’t the medicine women like us take be different from the medicine men take? And what about medicine for young children like this? That would naturally be different from adults, too!”

Her outcry knew no hesitation.

“How can they make such a shameless claim…! It means human lives are nothing at all if it’s for the sake of making money! Honestly, I’m just so angry!”

Beside the excited Ann, Mary nodded along in agreement.

“That’s right. It makes no sense that ordinary mothers like us know this common sense, but a high-ranking gentleman of the country doesn’t.”

The anger of ordinary housemaids, of two mothers raising children.

Sir Clark stared blankly at them for a moment, then soon broke into a faint smile accompanied by a deep realization.

If the effects of medicine differ by race, what about women and children? Why didn’t I think to wonder if those differ too?

It felt like hitting the bullseye.

As a physician and a scholar, he had tried hard to refute Viscount Palmerston’s sophistry with medical knowledge and logic. But the most powerful weapon of all was actually close at hand, nestled within the common sense of ordinary people.

Ann and Mary might never have read a book. They might not know a single line of Latin. But because they were the ones who had spent sleepless nights beside feverish children and had taken a child’s crying as guilt within their own hearts, they possessed a wisdom no scholar could ever match.

I finally understand why Her Majesty the Queen told me to come here.

The corners of Sir Clark’s eyes moistened slightly. If only their voices—these ordinary yet resolute voices ringing inside this small daycare center—could be heard by all of Britain. Perhaps they could be stronger than a hundred scholars, stronger than a thousand treatises. The old saying that truth always hides in the humblest places was not wrong.

“So you mean… to put those housemaids up as witnesses?”

Hearing what had happened at Kensington Palace, Gladstone asked back with an incredulous expression.

Doubt and bewilderment were mixed between his brows. In the world of politics, housemaids were backgrounds, not protagonists. Bringing the background onto the stage carried an instinctive sense of unfamiliarity.

“That is correct. Their voices will be the most powerful weapon to crush Viscount Palmerston’s sophistry.”

“But Sir Clark! They are merely housemaids working in the palace. They surely haven’t received a proper education, and there’s no way they could testify properly in an official setting like a committee…”

“Mr. Chairman.”

Sir Clark cut him off firmly.

“That very point is our weapon. Not high-ranking medical scholars or esteemed academics, but the voices of ordinary mothers raising children. The power of truth lies precisely there.”

Gladstone still wore a half-doubtful expression, but in the end, he nodded at Sir Clark’s conviction-filled gaze. At this point, he had to grasp at straws.

That afternoon, Ann and Mary stood before Sir Clark and Gladstone with bewildered expressions.

“Um, what brings you to us…”

When Ann asked cautiously, Sir Clark opened his mouth with a gentle smile.

“Would you perhaps… be willing to attend the ongoing Select Committee in Parliament as a witness?”

“U-us? But we are merely… housemaids working in the palace!”

Mary stammered out. The Select Committee of the Palace of Westminster—it was a world in the skies, somewhere she could never even imagine visiting in her lifetime.

“In principle, attendance as a witness at the Select Committee is open to all subjects except Her Majesty the Queen. Social standing is of no consequence.”

Gladstone explained calmly.

“The words you spoke to me at the daycare center, the anger you felt as mothers raising children… you simply need to speak those same words before the committee.”

At Sir Clark’s words, Ann and Mary looked silently at each other’s faces.

They were frightened. The thought of telling their story in front of countless nobles and members of Parliament was something they couldn’t even dare to imagine.

Yet at that moment, the faces of the children sleeping peacefully in the daycare center flashed into their minds.

They recalled the reality that, had the daycare center not existed, they might still be tipping terrible Godfrey’s Cordial—known as “Mother’s Comfort”—down their own children’s throats.

Fear and memory. As those two emotions were placed on opposite sides of the scale, the balance slowly began to tilt toward one side. It was terrifying. It was scary. Their bodies trembled.

Yet in the end, the mother’s scale tilted toward the children’s faces.

Ann bit her lip and raised her head.

“…I’ll do it!”

She no longer wavered in fear.

At Ann’s resolve, Mary nodded as well.

“As a mother, if it means protecting my child and every child in this country from that terrible medicine.”

When the Select Committee resumed a few days later, it was bustling with even more people than before. Thanks to the provocative topic of racial theory thrown out by Viscount Palmerston, reporters and spectators had flocked in like clouds.

“We will bring in the next witness.”

At Gladstone’s declaration, the meeting room grew briefly noisy. Everyone looked as though they were anticipating what prominent scholar or physician would appear this time.

Yet stepping into the witness stand, defying everyone’s expectations, were two young women in neat uniforms. The nobles and members of Parliament seated in the hall began to whisper among themselves.

“Who are those women?”

“Judging by their attire, they look like servants… Has Gladstone finally gone mad?”

The whispering of the nobles and MPs surged like a wave.

A wave mixed with contempt and curiosity. Even Viscount Palmerston stroked his chin with an intrigued look at the unexpected appearance of the witness. It was the expression of a knight when an unexpected piece appeared on the chessboard, though he did not yet know in what manner this piece would move.

Ann and Mary swallowed hard as they felt hundreds of gazes fixated upon them.

Gazes filled with individual prejudice, curiosity, anticipation, and contempt. All those weights rested upon the two women’s shoulders.

Their legs trembled, but the two tightly grasped each other’s hands.

For the courage of a single person standing alone becomes an object of mockery, but the courage of two people holding hands becomes the center of attention.

“Witnesses, please state your names and positions.”

At Gladstone’s words, Ann spoke first with a trembling voice.

“I am Ann Smith, a housemaid working in the linen room of Kensington Palace.”

At that moment, all noise in the meeting room ceased as if by a lie.

Her Majesty’s… housemaid?

Shock and bewilderment swept across the people’s faces.

Why on earth was a housemaid from Kensington Palace—the heart of Britain, where Her Majesty the Queen once resided—standing as a witness in this place?

Following that, Mary spoke in a slightly clearer voice.

“I am Mary Jones, a housemaid working in the same place.”

Gladstone asked the two of them.

I understand you are both mothers with young children. Is that correct?

“Yes, that is correct.”

“While raising your children, have you ever used Godfrey’s Cordial, or considered using it, in order to work?”

Hearing those words, Ann bit her lip for a moment, her eye rims growing slightly red as she opened her mouth.

“…To be honest, I have.”

Her voice was small, but it echoed clearly throughout the entire meeting room.

“Having to leave a child alone at home to go to work, when the baby cried and fussed through the night… it was truly like hell.”

The air in the meeting room changed.

The mouths of the nobles who had been whispering until just moments before snapped shut. They had heard the word hell in diplomatic documents, from pulpit sermons, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet they were hearing about a hell made of a small child’s cries for the first time.

“I had to work to make a living, yet the child kept pulling at my heartstrings… On such days, there were times when I almost reached out for that terrible medicine without even realizing it.”

An unadorned testimony was stronger than a heart-stirring speech.

Lacking artifice, it surpassed rhetoric; lacking formal logic, it transcended logic.

What Ann described was not a theory, but life itself.

And life could never become the target of refutation.

Viscount Palmerston’s brow twitched faintly for the first time. A tiny crack appeared in his flawless mask for the first time. He had been prepared to deal with the abstraction of race.

He could handle the abstraction of economics, the abstraction of sovereignty, and the abstraction of civilization. But standing before him was not a figure from the distant East.
It was a woman. It was a mother. An ordinary person with a name, tears, and a history.

“What about now?”

“Fortunately, it is fine now.”

A faint smile bloomed across Ann’s face. A smile born amidst tears. So radiant was that smile that several people in the spectator gallery pulled out handkerchiefs.

“Her Majesty the Queen established a daycare center inside the palace for us. Now we can leave our children in a safe place and work with peace of mind. Never again… we no longer have to think of that terrible medicine.”

Never again.

How many nights, how many children’s cries, how many temptations were melted into that single word? She was a person who had crossed the river of hell and returned just to utter those two words.

As the testimony concluded, Gladstone turned around and glared pointedly at Viscount Palmerston. His blue eyes contained a flame as cold as ice.

“Precisely so. Parents had to mix medicine containing laudanum and feed it to their children just to earn a crust of bread. You ask if drug effects differ by race? Then what would you say to the children in our own Britain today who must wave goodbye to their parents while intoxicated on laudanum? Just as tea imported from Qing China is tea to us, is poison not poison to them as well!”

“Hear, hear!”

An exclamation burst out somewhere in the gallery, and that cry immediately led to thunderous applause.

The situation reversed in an instant. Viscount Palmerston’s racial logic was gradually losing ground in the face of criticism that it was mere hypocrisy chasing profit while turning a blind eye to children’s suffering.

Yet Viscount Palmerston was a veteran politician.

The skill he had honed over a lifetime was displayed precisely in moments like this; waiting for the applause to subside, he slowly rose from his seat.

“That was a touching testimony.”

His voice was gentle. He bowed respectfully toward Ann and Mary.

“It is surely thanks to diligent and devoted mothers like you two that our Britain is sustained.”

It sounded like a thoroughly commonplace compliment. Yet that cunning smile still lingered at the corners of his lips.

“However.”

He continued, looking around the meeting room.

“Is there not a fact that we are overlooking? The reality that laudanum has been used most usefully over the past decades, particularly in easing the suffering of women and children.”

The meeting room began to murmur once again.

“When plagued by frequent headaches, neuralgia, and unspeakable agony, how great a comfort a single cup of laudanum has been! Furthermore, just like the witnesses present here, has not women’s ability to step beyond the household, enter society, and fulfill their roles also been made possible precisely because laudanum temporarily quieted children’s petty fussing?”

“…!”

Gladstone doubted his ears.

What on earth is he saying now? Is he claiming women’s liberation was made possible thanks to laudanum?

Viscount Palmerston was attempting to overturn even the wretched testimony of the housemaids with the bizarre logic that laudanum served a positive function in aiding women’s social advancement. It was the black magic of language itself—turning poison into an instrument of liberation, and chains of oppression into the wings of freedom.

The reporter for The Morning Chronicle was frantically working his quill. It felt as though the sound of ink dancing excitedly across paper could be heard. One didn’t need to look to know how tomorrow’s newspaper would be published.

The next morning, I smiled as I looked at the newly arrived Morning Chronicle.

Does Viscount Palmerston have any idea what he just said?

He had pulled out the tactic of burying one issue with another to escape a corner.
It was an old trick in the political arena, but in my view, he had made a fatal mistake.
Covering up an issue was fine, but he didn’t realize that the blanket he used to cover it would end up entangling his own feet.

If it’s a battle of public opinion like this, I’ve had my fill of it back in South Korea.
Besides, Viscount Palmerston might as well have touched people who should never, under any circumstances, be touched.

Who were they, you ask?

“Baroness Lehzen?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“I must visit Kensington Palace after a long while.”

“Shall I prepare an afternoon tea party?”

“Splendid. Please hand out invitations generously, just like last time. Make sure as many people come as possible.”

At the same time, Mrs. Ashburton was unfolding the freshly arrived newspaper.

[Laudanum: The Hidden Helper of Women’s Liberation?: Viscount Palmerston Points to the Core of the Controversy with Foresight Ahead of His Time]

“So laudanum liberated women like us?”

Mrs. Ashburton could not hide her astonishment as she read through the article. Or rather, she was glaring at the newspaper with eyes full of contempt, as if ready to burn it to ashes.

She recalled the path she had crossed over the past few months.

The headaches that visited every single night and the anxiety she tried to soothe with a drop or two of laudanum.

The lethargy that kept her from rising from beneath the covers in the morning, right down to the terrible nightmares of the previous night.

And how brilliant had those days of learning to love the mornings again and nights where she could dream once more—brought about by the small miracle that started from a single cup of chamomile tea given by Her Majesty the Queen!

Those miracles were actually shackles, not liberation? What utter nonsense.

Right at that moment.

The butler quietly stepped into the parlor and placed an envelope upon a silver tray.
A red royal crest stamped upon thick, high-quality paper.

An invitation to Kensington Palace.

A smile slowly blossomed at the corners of Mrs. Ashburton’s lips.

It was a warm yet resolute smile, entirely different from the contempt she had directed at Viscount Palmerston’s article just moments before.

She accurately grasped the meaning of this invitation.

Her Majesty the Queen was summoning her comrades.

And that summons was a mobilization order for the battle about to unfold.