Chapter 329: Gold Medal Pig Herder

Chapter 326 – Gold Medal Pig Herder

As a port city founded in the 13th century, Liverpool has spanned the Canaries, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Stuarts and up to today’s Hanoverians.

This relatively peaceful environment has led to a wide variety of architectural styles, whether it’s the angular Gothic with its steeples and spires, the Tudor style with its striped façade and half-timbered buildings, or the Georgian architecture that has been popular for a century, combining the curvaceous shapes of the Baroque with the decorative elements of the Rococo, you’ll find it all in Liverpool.

And Castle Street, home to Liverpool City Hall, is where the Tudor style is at its best.

Only today’s Arthur apparently did not have time to appreciate these centuries-old buildings, even in the midst of the lights, men, women and countless dignitaries of the ball, this Scotland Yard superintendent from London also became a not so small focus.

There was a steady stream of guests coming to make toasts and chat, and perhaps because the climate in Liverpool is so much better than London’s, the people of Liverpool were more welcoming than the people of London.

Everywhere Arthur went, whether it was the smoking room, the recreation room, or the corners of the ballrooms and restaurants, there were fresh faces coming up to chat.

These people include government employees working in various departments in Liverpool, there are also engaged in a variety of local businesses, of course, there are also some like Gladstone aspiring to join the political circle of upwardly mobile young people.

But according to Arthur’s observation, there was still a certain difference between the political tendencies of Liverpool and London.

In London, the power of the Tories and the Whigs was basically fifty-fifty.

And in Liverpool, those who held the Tory position were significantly higher than those who held the Whig position.

But when you think about it this isn’t that hard to explain.

As a city that made its fortune through the slave trade, most of the people of Liverpool were inextricably linked to the slave business. That being the case, how could they possibly like the Whigs who introduced the Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill?

Not to mention, Mr. William Wilberforce, the advocate of abolitionism, was not satisfied with just abolishing the slave trade. He wanted to take advantage of the return of the Whigs to power to abolish slavery in Britain and the overseas colonies, and to free the slaves who had been trafficked before the abolition of the slave trade.

And according to the first bill proposed by Wilberforce and his supporters, these abolitionists didn’t want to give even a penny to the slave owners. They claimed that if slave owners wanted compensation, they should go to the slave traders who sold them slaves.

Such behavior naturally caused an extreme local backlash in Liverpool, and it’s no wonder that the Liverpool City Council was littered with Tories from old to young.

In the middle of the ballroom, Arthur was waltzing under the lead of a young lady, and under the ambiguous lighting, their ears were full of the low voices of other dancers whispering amongst themselves.

The lady appeared to have an inquisitive mind, and although she had danced with the sheriffs of Liverpool in the past, it was the first time she had ever been in contact with the head of a brand new vigilante organization such as Scotland Yard.

Whether it was Arthur’s epaulettes, the King’s court sword, or the encounters that Scotland Yard officers would run into in their daily operations, she was intrigued.

And on Arthur’s side, he had guessed early on that the ladies would most likely ask about it.

Relying on the year he had known the ladies of the Blue Stocking Society, things had come to a head, and he had a preliminary understanding of the topics that the ladies might be interested in.

The secret history of the palace was definitely the one that would arouse their interest the most, but unfortunately, Arthur didn’t know much about it, so the few reserves of knowledge could only be used as a killer.

But he couldn’t talk about the king’s family affairs, but he could still talk about the folk’s Arthur.

Frankenstein, the origin of the species, marriage lawsuits, cases of spring trafficking, and, failing that, a little more about Mrs. Berkeley’s little whip and a certain Earl who left her ladyship’s room in the cool of the night.

Still, when talking about these issues, one has to be careful to be felicitous and not bring the ladies’ emotions up too high all at once.

Since coming to London, Arthur had learned that over-excited ladies could really faint on the spot for you. A long time ago, he had always thought that it was made up by ‘unscrupulous novelists’ like Dickens, Dumas and Mr. Disraeli.

But in reality, due to the corsets commonly worn by ladies in this day and age would compress the lungs, change the position of the ribs, and squeeze some of the organs against the spine and even push them into the small of the back.

Therefore, ladies would often experience difficulty in breathing and blood supply, which in turn affected their appetite and further created a vicious circle.

Of course, in the opinion of Arthur, who had a rough knowledge of chemistry, those toxic cosmetics should also bear some responsibility for the ladies’ fainting phenomenon.

However, it is not always the case that the fainting spells of the ladies are caused by physiological reasons; it is also a social tool for them.

Since women are considered to be synonymous with vulnerability and sensuality, fainting in public fits in with society’s perception of them, and is therefore not only not considered rude, but rather an act of grace.

Ladies were free to use this trick when they were tired or didn’t want to continue a conversation with their guests, and from what Arthur had observed at parties, the results were usually quite favorable.

Except that the lady Arthur had run into today was clearly over-energized, and she hadn’t wanted to pass out for a while.

“You waltz very well, did you hire someone specifically to learn? Or did some lady bring you in?”

“Yes? Thanks for the compliment. If a few of my friends heard that, they’d be pleased; I basically learned my dancing from them.”

“To be able to teach such wonderful students as you, they must all be regulars at social banquets.”

“It’s true that I can’t hide anything from you. Yes, several of my friends are there almost every day. And it’s not just London either, they’re somewhat well known in Parisian social circles as well.”

“Paris? Wow, my goodness! I told you how you could see some French in your dancing. Since you have French friends, surely you speak French?”

“Un peu, a little bit, if it’s just simple communication that should be fine.”

When the lady heard this, she instantly switched languages and a series of French words hit Arthur in the face, and it took him a while to figure out what they meant.

Arthur smiled back, “It’s like the French always say, the lake is not on fire inside, you can slow down a little.”

No sooner had Arthur said this than the rest of his eyes caught a glimpse of a burly figure flashing past him.

The fat Frenchman wrapped his arm around his dance partner’s waist and flickered past, leaving only a French phrase in Arthur’s ear, “Arthur! Je te dis merde!”

Arthur’s brow furrowed furiously at this, and he turned his head toward Dumas, “Did you just curse me? I can hear merde.”

Dumas smiled back unconcernedly, “Arthur, this is a special usage, although the sentence with merde is mostly used to scold people, but this is a blessing. You know, I’m a playwright, and in our line of work we often use it to bless actors. You see, if there’s more horse manure in front of the theater, it means business is better than it used to be.”

When Dumas’ partner heard this, she could not help but laugh, “Mr. Dumas, you are so funny.” But Arthur asked with a straight face, “Then the question arises, who is the horse manure if I am the actor?”

The dance partner in Arthur’s arms couldn’t help but blush when she heard this, and she pulled out her handkerchief and reprimanded with a red face, “Disrespectful, how very disrespectful!”

Dumas’ dance partner also sensed the impropriety, and she too let go of her hand and excused herself to Dumas, “I’m sorry, Alexander, I have to go along and see Jenny.”

Arthur was free, and the little smoker finally had a chance to fumble his pipe out of his pocket as he poked Dumas with his elbow and said, “Go? To the smoking room?”

Dumas rolled his eyes and said, “Arthur, why did you bring that up? This is great, I’m going to get the shit on my head again for saying the lady is horse manure.”

Arthur embraced Dumas as he walked toward the smoking room and spoke, “Alexander, I really didn’t realize that your line turned out to be a real blessing.”

“Or else? Now your horse manure is gone and so is mine. Arthur, you’re doing yourself a disservice!”

Dumas huffed and walked with Arthur into the smoking room, where, perhaps because the ball had already begun, there were noticeably fewer guests staying than before.

The only people in the large smoking room were Heine and Louis, who were smoking and making small talk at the same time.

“I found a few copies of the Britannia magazine earlier and briefly flipped through it. To be honest, the freedom to publish in Britain is more expansive than I thought. If your copy of Overview of Napoleon’s Thoughts was in Austria, it would have been censored by order of Metternich, and the Austrians can’t see anyone saying anything halfway favorable about Napoleon.”

“It can’t be helped; that’s the way losers think. They have not defeated France, so Metternich has held a lasting grudge and fear since the beginning. This is evident from the fact that he keeps my brother under house arrest at court like a canary. Metternich does not regard him at all as an Austrian prince; he sees only that he is Napoleon’s son.”

“Then again, what brought you to Scotland Yard as a policeman? The Bonaparte family name isn’t as influential as it was earlier in Europe, but it’s not so bad that you’re reduced to going out into the streets and beating people up with a stick in your belt, is it?”

“Heinrich, what shall I tell you? The Bonaparte surname is not only an honor, but also a heavy burden. Perhaps it is the blow I received from the failure of the charcoal-burning party uprising in Italy that makes me not want to think about too many things for the time being now. It’s good for me to do simple things in peace. One has to find something for oneself, doesn’t one?
Besides, you take the profession of a policeman so cheaply that I wonder if you are a Prussian at all. When I was at military school in Switzerland I heard that not using honorifics to the police in Prussia was punishable by imprisonment, right?”

“Heh! Yes, that’s what makes the profession lowly, in my opinion.”

Arthur pushed the door open and lit his pipe and took a sip, “If we go by your system of evaluation, then the British police should be able to be slightly more noble than their Prussian counterparts.”

Dumas, who hadn’t lost his temper at this point, spoke up and followed up, “Exactly, it’s like the difference between Je te dis merde and merde.”

Louis saw Arthur come in and opened his mouth to ask, “That said, what are you going to do about Liverpool? Although the Dock Committee and the Port Authority have ostensibly begun to segregate the merchant ships as requested, who knows if they’ve been transporting the goods as smuggled goods behind their backs to the neighboring cliffs to hide them for distribution. And it seems that today Liverpool’s city council has decided to send representatives to London to protest upwards against the Cabinet’s segregation policy.”

Arthur waved his hand and said, “I’m sure the Royal Navy’s anti-smuggling fleet will give them a boost, so we don’t need to worry about that. Moreover, on our trip to Liverpool, smuggling is not even a key issue, what the cabinet wants is actually to suppress the cases in Liverpool, the reason why they want to treat smuggling strictly is because they feel that the cases are imported through smuggling. But it’s debatable whether cholera is specifically spread through the miasma on the ship.”

Louis returned, “But before we figure out the cause of the disease, isn’t it safest to do things according to the rules set by the cabinet? As long as we strictly carry out the cabinet’s orders, even if something goes wrong in the end, the blame won’t be placed on us.”

“That’s right, if one is just running towards not getting into trouble themselves, doing so is certainly the safest thing to do. But that’s not what I had in mind, Louis; in fact, I wasn’t idle when you went to investigate during the day. Do you know what I went to investigate?”

Speaking of which, Arthur fished out a map crawling with little red dots from his jacket pocket.

Louis and the others came over to look at it, “What’s this?”

Arthur took off his pipe and said, “You came to the Police Intelligence Bureau relatively late, so you don’t know what we used to do. The predecessor of the Police Intelligence Bureau was the Provisional Survey and Statistics Bureau of the London Region, at that time, the Home Secretary Sir Peel explicitly assigned us the job of measuring and counting the narrow streets in the East End, to prove the correlation between the narrow streets and the crimes such as assaults on police officers, in order to make a motion to the Parliament to expand the refurbishment of the streets in the East End by the Ministry of the Interior in due course.

However, due to the fall of the Tories and the reorganization of the LPS into the Police Intelligence Service, the issue has been shelved for the time being. However, while the issue was shelved, I learned to find relevance through maps. As Liverpool had an early outbreak, it also provided quite a lot of data for the cholera map. Look at this map, what can you tell?”

Heine pondered for a moment and spoke, “Most of the cholera outbreaks were in poorer neighborhoods?”

Alexandre Dumas also analyzed, “The red dots are very dense, so it’s a bunch of outbreaks if the disease doesn’t break out. Does this mean that the miasma theory is actually right? The environment is usually worse where the paupers live, so once a certain area is contaminated by miasma, there will be a massive outbreak of cases.”

Louis’ eyes swept over the map as he frowned in thought for half a day before suddenly pointing at a blank area amongst a bunch of red dots on the map and asking, “Why is this place fine? It’s also a slum area, there’s no reason why the surrounding areas are all contaminated by miasma and this is the only place that’s clean!”

Arthur smiled and spoke, “I was thinking about this before, so I even made a special trip there this afternoon. It turned out that that place is a porter beer processing plant, and the people living nearby are also basically employees of the plant.”

“What do you mean? The beer was able to stop the cholera attack?”

“What kind of reasoning is that?”

“It’s unheard of. What’s going on here?”

Arthur nodded, “I went to talk to the locals about their illnesses, and they ended up telling me that not all Liverpool distilleries have this kind of good fortune, and that they’re just the exception to the rule. And when I asked what was the difference between this distillery and the others, they told me that the operators of this distillery were more generous, as long as they didn’t steal the factory’s products to go out and sell them, all the employees working here could have a good time and also take glasses of wine back. So, they, the families of the employees of the brewery, never drank water, but only drank wine to fill up their hunger like the medieval aristocrats, even to the extent that they would cook with beer.”

When Dumas heard this, he wondered, “If beer can fight cholera, why was the first case in Sunderland an old sailor? Sailors drink for their lives!”

Louis cupped his chin and guessed, “Could it be the type of alcohol? Only porter works?”

Heine spoke up, “In that case, are you planning to notify Liverpool’s Board of Health and have them go and give out free beer to the citizens for a few months? Although I don’t know if it’s effective or not, the brewery owners of Liverpool will surely be incredibly supportive of your decision.”

Arthur laughed and shook his head, “Heinrich, you did hit the nail on the head. The point of coming to Liverpool to engage in prevention and control, in order to do a successful job, is not whether it is right or wrong, but whether it can make people money. If I open my mouth and say that drinking can cure diseases, all the alcohol industry operators will support me. But just having their support is not enough.

And, in my opinion, it’s not necessarily the drinking of alcohol that cures disease, it’s more likely to be the water source. Look at this map, you guys, the red circles of disease outbreaks are almost always spreading outwards with the water wells as the center, if this is all a coincidence, it’s too strange.”

Heine’s eyes widened as he sniffed, “This …… seems to be true?”

Dumas, on the other hand, frowned, “Are you going to seal off all the wells? But that doesn’t seem to be any different from segregating the merchant ships, neither is very popular.”

“No, it’s not just the wells, it’s the aged sewage system.” Arthur spoke up, “Every aspect of this place needs a major refurbishment before it’s ready. Of course, the refurbishment assumes that Liverpool can prove to the council that the cholera is really caused by unclean water.”

Louis sniffed, and almost in a flash thought of the document he had submitted to Arthur today, “Arthur, are you thinking?”

Arthur nodded with a smile, “I’ve already forwarded that document over through a personal relationship, and they’ll definitely send someone to explain to me the problems in terms of explaining the expansion of the harbor. However, I don’t actually intend to give them trouble, as opposed to that, I want to support another big project for them. But the prerequisite for the establishment of the project is that they have to listen to me in order to do so.”

Agares, who was lying on the edge of the window, sniffed and tsked, “Worthy of being a gold medal pig farmer in York’s countryside, Arthur, you do know how to feed the piglets! Now, you don’t have to invite them, wiggle around the trough and they’ll all come sniffing for you.”

(End of chapter)