The echo of Arthur's speech still lingered in the vaulted chamber of the House of Lords long after he stepped down from the marble dais.
Though he had spoken with the measured calm of an accountant balancing a ledger, his words had fallen among the Lords like an unexpected frost, chilling the feverish heat of their war enthusiasm.
And London felt the cold almost immediately.
When the morning newspapers printed the figure—two million pounds—the city, which had roared for righteous vengeance only a day before, suddenly quieted. Behind shop windows and in taverns, whispers began to replace bravado.
"Two million… for a far-off conflict?"
"Is a quarrel over trade worth draining the treasury?"
"If taxes rise—who will pay them? Certainly not the aristocrats."
Even the industrialists and merchants, who only hours earlier had urged Parliament toward punitive action, faltered when imagining such sums vanishing into distant waters.
In Parliament, the effect was sharper still.
Members who previously invoked "honor" of Empire" now found themselves rereading Arthur's figures with troubled expressions. Some requested that the Treasury draft a full projected budget for any military expedition. A thin sense of sobriety returned to the political air.
For a moment—a fragile, glittering moment—Arthur believed the tide had turned. He dared to think that reason, when laid out with precision and numbers no one could deny, might actually prevail.
He was wrong.
He had underestimated the intoxication of pride.
He had underestimated the inertia of a nation accustomed to expansion.
And most of all, he had underestimated the East India Company.
When debate reached a standstill, Palmerston and the Company taipans launched their retaliatory assault—swift, coordinated, ruthless.
Coin and influence changed hands behind the scenes.
Newspapers once cautious now blazed with manufactured outrage, stoking the public's anger with lurid accounts and expert testimonies crafted to flatter British superiority.
The Qing Empire was painted as a decaying colossus, ripe for shattering.
Arthur's warnings were dismissed as the fears of an overcautious mind.
"Once our navy appears offshore," Palmerston proclaimed in Parliament, his voice sharp as a drawn sabre, "the decadent court will collapse. They will beg for mercy. They will compensate us a hundredfold."
Applause thundered across the chamber.
Behind the applause, the Company's machinery whirred with precision.
Industrial MPs were promised endless markets if the East opened—orders for textiles and machinery so vast that factories would run without pause.
Aristocratic MPs were tempted with visions of young officers ascending rapidly through the ranks, their family names crowned with glory.
And to the hesitant members of Arthur's own side, carefully sealed pouches heavy with gold were delivered without ceremony.
It was brute force—of money, ambition, and the myth of empire invincibility.
And under that force, the rational bulwark Arthur had erected collapsed in days.
The final vote was narrow, but decisive:
Parliament granted the government authority to undertake all necessary military action against the Qing Empire.
War had been set in motion.
Buckingham Palace — The Garden
The news reached Buckingham Palace as Arthur walked with Victoria along a pale winter path, her brown hair catching the last light of the afternoon. The moment she saw the headline, her face drained of color.
"They truly… voted for this madness?" she whispered, then louder—
"How could they?! After everything you told them? After all the evidence?!"
The newspaper slipped from her hand and fluttered to the gravel, its bold red ink a grim contrast against the pale stones.
Arthur picked it up with calm hands. He scanned the triumphant rhetoric splashed across the pages, but nothing in his expression shifted.
"I expected this," he said quietly.
This was the first time since he was reincarnated in this era that he encountered political defeat—not theoretical loss, but the cold, metallic taste of it. He had believed he could steer the with logic and economic truth.
But human nature, he now understood, bowed to neither.
He looked toward the distant gardens where crowds beyond the Palace gates celebrated a victory they believed inevitable.
"Victoria," he said softly, "never try to reason with a runaway carriage. The horses don't slow because you plead with them. They only run faster."
She sank onto a stone bench, her hands trembling with frustration.
"So what do we do?" she whispered. "Do we simply watch them drag this country into a disastrous, wasteful war? Into ruin?"
Arthur did not sit. He turned to her fully, and in his eyes burned a light she had seen only a handful of times—sharp, dangerous, calculating.
"No," he said.
The word was quiet, but it cut the air like the first crack of a storm.
"Since we cannot stop that carriage…"
He stepped closer, lowering his voice to a deliberate murmur.
"…we climb aboard."
Victoria's eyes widened. "Climb aboard?"
"And once aboard," Arthur continued, every syllable precise, "we seize the reins from the fool driving it."
The idea struck her like a blow—shocking, irresistible.
"We will decide where this carriage goes," Arthur said.
"And more importantly—"
He leaned in, his gaze unwavering.
"—we will decide how, and when, it stops. Perfectly."
The garden fell utterly still.
The distant cheers of Londoners seemed hollow now, fading beneath the quiet, rising certainty of something far more dangerous than war.
For the first time since the vote, Victoria felt a spark of hope.
Not because the war could be prevented.
But because Arthur had just shifted the board entirely.
And the Empire had no inkling of the player now moving his pieces.