Chapter 38

Rewind the clock back to that fateful day(?).

Beneath the glittering chandeliers of Buckingham Palace, the noble aristocrats who moved Britain were rolling on the floor.

Silk dresses and top-tier tailcoats were stained with vomit, and the air throbbed with the acrid stench of acid and the fishy odor of metallic blood.

In the palace’s annex, within a drawing room spared the worst of the commotion, a few key figures of the Conservative Party gathered with pale faces.

They, too, had tasted hell just moments prior, so their appearances were a wreck, but politicians are creatures who catch the scent of fortune amidst any disaster. Their stomachs had turned upside down, but their brains had already begun whirring.

“This is… treason! To dare feed poison to Her Majesty the Queen and the nobility!”

A member of Parliament wiped cold sweat with a wet towel and seethed with outrage.

“We must seize those merchant scoundrels this instant and hang them from the gallows! We must apply the charge of lase majesty!”

“Quite right! Brain matter in our food, of no less! Copper, of all things!”

Outrage erupted from here and there, and those of a hot-tempered disposition looked ready to bolt straight to the Metropolitan Police to lodge protests.

The pride of aristocrats who had just learned that what they consumed was filth indistinguishable from excrement had long since plummeted to the bottom of the Thames.

Their fury was directed primarily at the merchants who supplied the food, and secondarily at the act of daring to humiliate the nobility.

“Calm yourselves. Everyone is growing overexcited beyond reason.”

Robert Peel.
As the leader of the Conservative Party, prioritizing public safety and order above all else, his voice fell upon the noisy drawing room like a bucket of icy water.

Robert Peel’s father was not an aristocrat, but a textile factory owner much like Mr. Smith, who had made a name for himself with Lord Eau de Cologne.

He was a man who grew up amidst the clatter of factory machinery, yet he was someone who had climbed step by step from the starting point of being a factory owner’s son to the pinnacle of being the leader of the Conservative Party.

Through that process, he had learned two things.

First, the world rests upon order.

Second, order does not create itself.

Someone must forge it wielding will, laws, and power.

For laissez-faire (free-market capitalism) was merely the absence of order wrapped up in a plausible-sounding name.

“I wondered who it might be, and it was Sir Robert. Did you not also partake of those unmentionable, revolting concoctions, sir? Yet you counsel calm?”

A reply laced with sarcasm. Yet Robert Peel did not even blink.

To a politician, sarcasm was akin to air.

Reacting to sarcasm was something novices did; a master utilized sarcasm as a stepping stone for their own logic.

“Do you intend to conclude this merely by rounding up a few merchants and punishing them? The crime of lase majesty? Very well. We may clap the scoundrels in irons. But what good will any of that accomplish?”

With that, Robert Peel gazed toward the water pitcher resting upon the table.

Water. The most fundamental element. The one thing that ought to be the purest.

Yet not a single person present in this room could guarantee with certainty that the water inside that pitcher was safe.

A world where even water was suspicious. That was the place where they currently stood.

“Then how do you propose we respond to the crisis currently unfolding, sir?”

“That is…”

Robert Peel’s brain kept whirring without pause, even amidst the agonizing twist of his stomach.

A politician’s brain is an organ that senses the vector of power under any circumstance, much like a compass pointing north amidst a storm.

Surely…

The face of the young Queen Majesty who had stood upon the podium until just moments prior flashed vividly within his memory.

When Dr. Lindley exposed that the milk contained calf brains, the bread alum, and the tea copper, what had been the Queen’s expression? Others had been too preoccupied with the rebellion of their own stomachs to afford the luxury of observing the Queen’s face, but he had kept his gaze locked upon the Queen on the podium even while suppressing the urge to retch.

That was his instinct—observing those at the center of power. Because all strategy originates from that observation.

Closer to… fury, rather than surprise.

Indeed. Not a trace of surprise lingered upon the Queen’s visage.

Surprise is an emotion manifesting when one encounters the unexpected.

The eyes of a startled person widen, whereas the eyes of an infuriated person narrow.

And the eyes of the Queen he had beheld were narrowed.

At that moment, the puzzle pieces began slotting into place one by one.

The sudden appearance and commotion stirred up by a fellow named Dr. Lindley.

The instruction summoning London merchants at random to deliver their goods precisely as-is.

The placement of a microscope squarely in the middle of the garden.

What if all of this was not coincidence, but someone’s deliberate design?

Dr. Lindley, who intelligence reports stated had been frequently visiting Buckingham lately.

A botanist. A scientist deeply versed in microscopes. For such a figure to appear intoxicated at precisely this venue, analyze precisely that milk via microscope, and expose precisely those results in the most dramatic fashion possible?

Once might be termed coincidence.

Thrice, however, was another name for design.

“Huu…”

Robert Peel attempted to draw in a deep breath, only to wince once more at the acrid stench, slowly solidifying the intuition rising within his mind into firm conviction.

If so, what precisely did Her Majesty intend to convey through today’s affair?

Behold.
The dining tables of London are in this wretched state, so reform them?

Nay.

Had she wished merely to order such simple improvements, far more refined methods would have been at her disposal.

The Queen could have written a letter. Issued a royal decree. Quietly dropped a hint to the Prime Minister.

Yet she bypassed all those refined methods and selected the most barbaric one.
She forced them to ingest the poison directly. Into the mouths of the powerful, into the mouths of lawmakers, into the mouths of the nation’s rulers for whom poison remained unpunishable before the law.

Why?
Because one only understands upon partaking. There are things incapable of being conveyed through explanations. Things impossible to feel through reports. Things unknowable through statistics.

Yet there are things understood for the very first time when one’s own stomach turns inside out. Perhaps the Queen had forcibly injected that comprehension.

“Uu… Sir Robert…”

Turning his head, he beheld Lord Lambert, a senior member belonging to the Whig Party, crawling upon the floor.

The mouth that had once poured forth brilliant sentences armed with rhetorical flourishes from the parliamentary podium was now dribbling saliva upon the floor.

That spectacle Robert Peel gazed upon for a long, lingering moment.

Much as a scholar gazes through a microscope, much as a painter observes a model, much as a politician does the moment they discover an enemy’s weakness.

Lord Lambert.

One who had preached free trade and blindly trusted in the self-correcting mechanisms of the market.

One who had orated that government regulations distorted the market, that the invisible hand would independently find optimal equilibrium, and that infringing upon merchants’ freedom was tantamount to the retrogression of civilization.

That very man was now crawling upon the floor after ingesting the free poison manufactured by the free market.

The invisible hand.

That beautiful metaphor crafted by Adam Smith was currently acting as an invisible fist within this drawing room, bludgeoning Lord Lambert.

Wait… surely not?

In an instant, the final piece of the puzzle snapped into place like lightning.

Could what Her Majesty sought to reveal not be substandard food… but rather the failure of the Whig system?

Robert Peel began pouring out his words directly toward his fellow MPs.

“Respected members of Parliament, that tea and milk we partook of today—was it specially crafted as a poison engineered to assassinate us?”

The assembly fell silent.

“It was not. It is the routine, everyday food consumed and drunk day in and day out by the citizens of London, by our tenant farmers, and perhaps even by our servants.”

He swept his gaze slowly across the assembly.

“Her Majesty the Queen confirmed that reality for us today. In a most… shocking manner.”

“Th-Then Her Majesty deliberately…?”

“I believe so.”

Robert Peel spoke in a tone brimming with conviction.

“Her Majesty was well aware. She sought to demonstrate how thoroughly rotted and decayed the market of this nation is—that very invisible hand the Whigs have defended so unceasingly.”

He was certain.

Her Majesty had sought not merely to display the greed and depravity of merchants, but to nakedly expose the systemic failure of the Whig regime.

Britain was changing rapidly today.

Machines and factories emerged, cities grew bloated, and populations exploded.

Yet laws and institutions still left impoverished laborers to suffer in hunger, and their grievances were marching toward a critical threshold.

Not to mention, at a time when the Chartist movement and demonstrations demanding universal suffrage for workers were breaking out with some frequency, what if the subjects clearly realized that the white powder mixed into the bread they ate wasn’t flour, but bone dust and alum?

Riots would be a foregone conclusion.

Feeling a chill run down his spine, Robert Peel continued.

“Lord Melbourne and the Whigs have consistently championed free trade. They argue that guaranteeing merchants’ autonomy will lead the market to supply quality goods of its own accord.”

“Is that not a truth?”

“Thanks to that truth, we drank milk laced with brain matter today.”

At those words, the gazes of the people began to shift. From mere victimhood into the eyes of hunters who had discovered prey.

Imbuing fury with a vector. That was precisely the core skill a politician could wield.

“It has been proven that merchants are a breed willing to feed poison even to nobility for the sake of profit. Yet the Whigs have championed them and opposed regulations.”

Robert Peel drove home the wedge.

“In other words, the accomplices who humiliated us today are none other than the incompetent Whig government.”

“Oh…!”

Gasps erupted.

Punishing bad merchants over this incident was something mere amateurs in London’s political sphere would do.

Forgiving it into a colossal pretext capable of overturning the political landscape belonged to the realm of masters.

Even while remnants of vomit still lingered at the corners of his mouth, Robert Peel was forging that pretext.

The Whigs.

Those wretches were the ones who had argued for war with Qing China for attempting to ban the sale of opium.

Those who peddled opium to China while cloaking it in national interest had turned a blind eye when poisons were peddled to their own countrymen.

Where could one possibly find a better attacking point?

“Yet, Sir Robert, is Her Majesty the Queen’s intent truly so? Her Majesty is still young…”

An MP asked cautiously. Beneath those words lay the doubt of whether a maiden barely twenty years of age could be capable of this degree of political calculation.

“Young, you say?”

He shook his head.

“In the respected member’s eyes, she may appear a mere maiden…”

For a moment, Robert Peel shuddered.

The eyes of the Queen he had beheld at the banquet hall today.

Even after consuming that repulsive tea and bearing a pale face, the gaze that watched the nobles’ disgraceful behavior to the very end without a single trace of disruption belonged not to the youthful bravado of an inexperienced girl, but to someone who remained unperturbed amidst chaos—someone smiling at the eye of the storm.

If my judgment is correct… no one save myself stands a chance of clashing with Her Majesty and emerging victorious.

A master recognizes another master.

Only one who reads the opponent’s moves across the chessboard can gauge the depth of those moves.

The Queen Majesty reflected in Robert Peel’s eyes was by no means an innocent maiden.

She was a master who seemed to have spent decades tumbling and turning through London’s political sphere.

The sort of master who concealed a blade behind a smile, engineered wars under the guise of charity, and overturned the board before the adversary even realized it.

“Her Majesty desires a formidable faction capable of ending this madness.”

Robert Peel clenched his fist tightly.

“And that faction must not be the Whigs, who ally with incompetent and corrupt merchants, but rather our Conservative Party, which safeguards order, tradition, and the genuine safety of the subjects.”

At his declaration, the atmosphere of the drawing room grew searingly hot.

The agony stemming from the aftereffects of vomiting had long since been forgotten.

Within their eyes burned solely the yearning for power and the desire for vengeance against the political rivals who had upended them.

Robert Peel.

Hearing Prime Minister Lord Melbourne’s remark that the leader of the Conservative Party had proposed a food safety act, I felt as though I had unexpectedly encountered an ally.
Why he proposed such a thing, and what his motives were, remained unknown.

Yet motives were unimportant. What mattered was the outcome.

Because those walking in the identical direction can travel as companions, regardless of their reasons.

Regardless of all that, Lord Melbourne commented briefly on yesterday’s events.

“For common street riff-raff to resort to all manner of villainy simply to earn a few coins. Truly a regrettable affair.”

…Regrettable?

An incident where an entire family died, tens of thousands drank poison daily, and children’s candies were smeared with arsenic—and he called that regrettable?

How was that any different from viewing a blazing house fire and remarking, “It’s rather warm”?

“Regrettable indeed. Fraudulent as well.”

The moment I appended the word fraud, Lord Melbourne’s eyebrows twitched.

“I understand your anxiety that Her Majesty’s honor, having hosted the charity tea party, might be tarnished by the noisy commotion… but calling it fraud is somewhat exaggerated, is it not?”

“Exaggerated?”

“Buying and selling goods is a private contract between individuals. Even if the seller claims, ‘This is top-tier tea,’ the buyer should have inspected the wares carefully before purchasing.”

He spoke with utter nonchalance.

“Is there not even the saying Caveat Emptor (buyer beware)? It was necessary for the purchaser to exercise caution.”

Caveat Emptor.

This principle, imported from ancient Rome, was currently being utilized in 19th-century London as a shield for poisonous foods.

In an era devoid of ingredient labels, origins certifications, or even food inspection systems, how on earth was a consumer supposed to distinguish between roasted sheep excrement and tea leaves?

“Even experts who have spent a lifetime studying tea find it difficult to distinguish by eye alone, and only realize it after brewing it in hot water, they say. Truly no simple task.”

“In that case, consumers must simply grow smarter. After being swindled a few times, would they not develop an eye for discrimination? That is the self-correcting mechanism of the market.”

After being swindled a few times.

I read the implication hidden within those words.

To be swindled meant consuming poison. And a few times meant dying a few more times.

Did that mean death was this era’s schoolteacher, poison its textbook, and the graveyard its diploma?

Ah. This is the free market’s educational philosophy. Adam Smith would shatter his coffin and burst right out.

Thinking for a moment on why Lord Melbourne was behaving thus, the events of the interim unfurled rapidly inside my head.

Following the defeat of the motion to declare the Opium War, the Whig administration found itself in a precarious position—and now, out of nowhere, the substandard food issue erupting in Parliament made the collapse of the ruling party’s authority a foregone conclusion.

Moreover, what on earth had the Prime Minister been doing to allow our Queen Majesty to partake of food so atrocious (which the Queen intended), horrifying (again, intended by the Queen), nauseating (likewise), and fit only for Frenchmen (that part was unintended)? The condemning public opinion had been immense, so he must have suffered quite a deal of emotional turmoil.

Indeed.

Lord Melbourne was currently whining. A refined, elegant form of whining characteristic of a man holding the title of Prime Minister. And the essence of that whine was: ‘Why must you make things difficult for me?’

Furthermore, Lord Melbourne was a Whig through and through to the marrow of his bones. To them, free trade, small government, and market infallibility rendered the market an inviolable sacred realm.

I heaved a deep sigh, suppressing my rising fury.

I had to approach this rationally, legally.

“Market freedom is all well and good, but the state has an obligation to protect the lives and safety of its citizens. Is turning a blind eye to the sale of such poison-grade foods not dereliction of duty?”

Yet Lord Melbourne shook his head.

“Your Majesty, however cold it may sound, the government cannot go about inspecting every single bakery, butcher shop, and tea merchant individually. We lack both the manpower and the budget.”

He let out a small sigh as he spoke.

“Above all, if the government begins interfering in the market by dictating what may or may not be sold, it will crush the vitality of the merchants.”

“The vitality of merchants? By slipping poison into human stomachs?”

“Money circulates, does it not?”

His reply was succinct and cruel.

Because money circulates.

Because the economy keeps running even if fake goods get sold.

If even poison gets traded, the market functions.

Even if people die, as long as money circulates, it is acceptable.

This was the economics of this era. This was the true visage of the invisible hand of this age.

For the hand was invisible, yet what that hand grasped was coins, not human hands.