The farcical "workers' uprising" in Hyde Park, which had begun in noisy enthusiasm only to collapse in a whimper, ended in a way no observer—nor participant—had foreseen.
Once domestic matters were finally smothered and brought to heel, Arthur Lionheart at last gained the leisure to return to his grander and infinitely more amusing engagement: the world-map game—a game in which nations were pieces and human passions the true supply lines.
And his most important piece still lay far across the Atlantic: the United States of America—a young, voracious, contradictory nation, brimming with restless ambition and an almost childlike hunger for destiny.
Buckingham Palace — Arthur's private study
Victoria watched her husband with an affectionate bewilderment.
Arthur had, for the past several days, become increasingly and most delightfully obsessed with a peculiar "game." He had ordered a dozen brass stamps—heavy, circular things resembling miniature medals—each carved with a cryptic symbol. Every afternoon he secluded himself before a sprawling map of North America, solemnly marking it as though performing a sacred rite.
"My dear," she finally ventured, "what new toy occupies you so thoroughly today?"
Arthur lifted his head. A sly brilliance gleamed in his eyes—the same look of a clever boy who has just hidden fireworks beneath someone's favorite armchair.
"I am," he said lightly, "spreading the Gospel."
"The… Gospel?" Victoria repeated, puzzled.
"Yes." Arthur pointed to the fresh marks on the map. "Observe: this stamp bears a pickaxe and shovel. I placed it beside a quaint little river valley called Sacramento, in California."
"This one has an enraged bull engraved upon it. I set it in Texas—on that vast, hungry prairie."
"And this," he said, tapping a mark near Washington, "depicts a broken flagstaff. I pressed it upon that small white house where the American president stubbornly resides."
Victoria inspected the symbols. To her they were strange, even whimsical, their meaning elusive.
Arthur smiled and imparted their significance in a low, conspiratorial tone:
"The pick and shovel signify wealth.
The bull embodies rage.
And the broken flagstaff represents… division."
"Riches, rage, and division," he murmured, a dark spark lighting his gaze. "Dearest Victoria, would not the simultaneous imposition of these three forces upon a young, impulsive, expansion-drunk nation produce events of the… most fascinating kind?"
She shivered—not out of fear, but out of the familiar thrill he always stirred in her. For all his ruthless political brilliance, Arthur's tenderness toward her remained unshakably warm; she felt safe, even cherished, in the orbit of a man the world would one day learn to fear.
United States — New York City
Benjamin Day, editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, received an anonymous "letter to the editor" posted from London.
The writer, styling himself with mysterious flourish, claimed that a daring British explorer friend had ventured deep into the scarcely populated region of California—still nominally Mexican territory—and had discovered an astonishing quantity of gold in a small river.
"The gold there lies as plentiful as the pebbles in an English meadow!" the letter declared with theatrical exaggeration. "Every handful of river-sand glitters with God's own sunlight. My friend swears the place is nothing less than Heaven's abandoned Golden City!"
Enclosed was a hand-drawn "map"—so crude it bordered on parody, yet marked with enticing landmarks.
Benjamin's first instinct: Which madman scribbled this nonsense?
But then he noticed the fine quality of the paper… the faded wax seal… the faint outline of what appeared to be an aristocratic European crest. His journalist's instinct—a beast sharper than hunger—twitched.
True or false, the letter screamed front-page sensation.
After only a brief inner struggle, he succumbed.
He trimmed the contents and published it boldly the next morning under the headline:
"A Golden Legend from California!"
The reaction across the American East Coast was instantaneous and volcanic.
"Gold?! California has gold?!"
"Is it true? It can't be true!"
"Who cares—it's better than starving! I'm going west!"
Society ignited under the most primal of all human hungers: the hunger for gold.
And just then, Arthur Lionheart's second strike fell.
—
Agents of the Future Industries Group, following Arthur's personal directive, began buying advertising space in major American newspapers—without concern for price. But these were no commercial advertisements.
They were propaganda manifestos.
Each poster displayed Miss Columbia, crowned and robed in the Stars and Stripes—half-goddess, half-conqueror—bearing a torch in one hand and a schoolbook in the other as she led pioneers toward the sunlit West.
Beneath her figure blazed a slogan of arrogance:
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, all is the land ordained by God!"
Arthur Lionheart had coined the phrase himself—an ideological wildfire packaged for a nation eager to burn.
The slogan spread like a virus through the American psyche, striking the buried nerves of conquest, entitlement, and grandiose national will.
Gold fever + Divine destiny.
Under this double intoxication, America lost its reason.
Tens of thousands of unemployed workers, bankrupt farmers, drifters and dreamers sold what little they owned, formed caravans, and marched westward—haggard, hopeful, desperate—for their promised paradise.
Arthur Lionheart had ignited an early, explosive Westward Expansion, using a mixture of media manipulation and ideological engineering that belonged to a future age.
And the very first consequence of this frenzy was predictable—
almost elegant in its inevitability:
The already brittle territorial tension between the United States and Mexico
was driven to the breaking point.