The House of Commons vibrated with restless anticipation.
The ancient hall, with its carved wood and flickering gas lamps, seemed to inhale with the crowd — ministers, nobles, bishops, journalists, even members of the royal family seated high in the private galleries.
This was no ordinary debate.
Today, the chamber was an arena.
Prince Albert was already speaking, standing at the podium with the stillness of polished stone. Behind him, chalk words filled the blackboard: education, charity, morality. His voice rang clear, the practiced tone of a man certain of his own virtue.
"Ladies and gentlemen, London is being devoured by poverty and pollution!"
He described the East End as a kind of earthly hell: filthy streets, the Thames blackened with waste, starving children, workers coughing in soot-thick air. As he spoke, his graceful rhetoric painted those scenes so vividly that several ministers nodded with grave sympathy.
Then came the solutions. He gestured elegantly toward the board.
"First, education! Schools for the poor. Knowledge is the only escape from misery."
"Next, charity! A royal fund to aid those who have nothing."
"And finally, morality! A greater role for the Church, to guide the lost and keep them from vice."
He spoke for nearly an hour — heartfelt, refined, noble.
For the nineteenth century, it was even progressive.
His supporters erupted into applause.
"A truly enlightened vision!"
"His Highness is an honor to the Crown!"
Albert turned toward Arthur Lionheart, offering a smile sharpened with triumph. He was already tasting victory.
When the moderator announced Arthur's name, the hall fell into a silence so deep it seemed carved from stone.
Arthur rose without haste. No papers. No notes. No fleeting glance at the crowd. He walked to the blackboard with slow, deliberate steps.
And with a single motion, he erased everything Albert had written.
A soft gasp rippled through the chamber.
Albert's smile cracked.
"What do you think you're doing?" he snapped, his aristocratic calm faltering.
Arthur didn't acknowledge him. He faced the crowd — the white gloves, dark coats, top hats, and wide curious eyes — and spoke with a quiet sharpness, a blade wrapped in velvet.
"His Highness has shared noble ideas. A brilliant speech, full of compassion."
He paused. Then his voice shifted — deepening, grounding, striking.
"But with all due respect, what he proposes is nothing more than a painkiller for a patient dying of terminal cancer. It soothes the suffering… but cures nothing."
The metaphor hit like thunder.
No one in the room had ever heard such medical bluntness.
Arthur picked up a piece of chalk and sketched a crude map of London.
"London's misery is not caused by laziness, nor by a lack of virtue. No sermon will fix this city. London suffers because it is built wrong. It is chaos made solid — homes beside factories, children playing near industrial runoff, streets clogged beyond reason, the Thames used as both water supply and open sewer."
He wiped the map away.
Then he began drawing something entirely different — a design so orderly, so visionary, that for a moment the chamber forgot it was the nineteenth century at all.
"My solution is reconstruction. A complete urban revolution."
He drew zones: elegant residential districts upriver, massive industrial sectors downriver, commercial areas separated by green belts. Then he drew lines that curled and branched like veins.
"A three-dimensional transportation network: broad avenues, steam trams, underground tunnels. Even a pedestrian subway."
Heads jerked upward.
A subway? It might as well have been sorcery.
Arthur went on.
"And finally, a public health system. Total separation of clean water and waste. Treatment plants upriver. A subterranean sewer network as vast and intricate as the human circulatory system. Every outflow directed far from the city and purified before returning to the sea."
He set the chalk down.
Silence overtook the chamber — a true, breathless hush.
Even Queen Victoria, seated in the upper gallery, had parted her lips in astonishment. Her eyes glimmered, reflecting a future she had never imagined anyone could describe so clearly.
Prince Albert stood frozen. He looked from the board to his own erased words — education, charity, morality — and they now seemed childish.
Tiny scratches beside Arthur's cathedral.
Arthur turned back to the assembly.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, his voice filling every corner, "poverty and pollution are not eternal curses. They are the predictable result of a city built without logic."
He stepped forward.
"If we dare to build with vision…"
His gaze met Victoria's.
"…we can transform London into something the world has never seen. A modern city. A radiant city. A city the future will envy."
His final words emerged as a solemn whisper.
"A true City of Miracles."