Arthur Lionheart laughed softly as he read Bismarck's letter—an artful mixture of appeals, laments, and carefully arranged concerns. Otto always wrote like a man pleading for advice while secretly begging for permission.
Arthur knew that game.
The Prussian minister understood perfectly well whom he meant to fight.
This wasn't a request for strategy.
It was a request for absolution.
A wolf asking a friend whether the sheep could be eaten.
Bismarck gambled that Arthur, would—out of devotion to the continental equilibrium—grant tacit blessing for a strike at Denmark, that inconvenient kingdom guarding the northern seas.
Arthur leaned back in his leather chair, amusement warming the corners of his mouth.
"A keen creature… Otto always smells the wind before anyone else."
He dipped his pen in ink and drafted a reply—brief, elegant, oblique. Men like Otto required hints, not sermons. A whisper carried more weight than a declaration.
My dear Otto,
A house is seldom prized for its roof or its painted walls.
What matters most is the modest key to its back door—especially when that door opens toward the sea.
May your King soon reclaim that missing key.
He sealed the letter with the Lionheart crest and sent it through the highest diplomatic courier.
Arthur could already imagine Otto reading the lines, purse his lips, and grin like a hunting dog finding a warm scent.
The key to the back door.
For Prussia, the key unlocking access to the Baltic and the North Sea could only be:
Schleswig and Holstein—the two duchies under Danish authority, bottling Prussia's maritime future.
Within that gentle metaphor, Arthur delivered three sharp truths:
You mean to strike Denmark. I'm aware.
I do not oppose you.
Proceed, my friend. Britain watches from the wings.
With such approval—veiled but unmistakable—Otto would launch himself upon Denmark with the enthusiasm of a starved wolf.
And once war erupted in the north, Austria—always jealous of Prussian ascendancy—would stumble into the struggle, dragged by pride and old grievances.
A splendid German quarrel begun with nothing more than a gentleman's note.
Britain, naturally, would remain distant and dignified—issuing pleas for peace, selling arms discreetly, and ensuring neither side grew strong enough to frighten London.
The purest form of proxy conflict.
The Russian Front
While Berlin simmered, Arthur's eyes turned eastward.
In Saint Petersburg, his arrangement with Tsar Nicholas I advanced steadily.
Under the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, a joint Anglo-Russian engineering mission had arrived in Sevastopol. The Russians, proud and earnest, assembled their best fortress engineers, hoping to study British harbour design.
Arthur, however, sent not fortification experts but his finest telegraph engineers, men skilled in cable laying, signalling, codework, and the new science of mechanical relay stations.
Officially, they were tasked with erecting a modern telegraph system linking the port with the inland command posts.
But their true assignment was far quieter—and far more British.
They introduced innocuous-looking line amplifiers, "safety repeaters," and "message stabilisers"—all legitimate devices used to strengthen telegraph transmissions over long distances.
Inside those wooden housings, however, were
duplicated needle relays,
parallel copper filaments,
and mechanical echo registers—
tools that allowed the British legation to receive a second copy of every message sent across the military telegraph lines.
To Nicholas I, the system was a marvel of British precision.
To Arthur, Crimea became a theatre whose curtains had been quietly pulled back.
Meanwhile, the ideological experiment unfolding in London blossomed.
The thirty young envoys from the Qing Empire—once bewildered by London's crowds, manners, and merciless clocks—were slowly reshaped by Arthur's curated elite curriculum.
Mornings at the Royal College: mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry.
Afternoons in Arthur's manufactories: steam engines humming like dragons, gearworks spinning with disciplined fury.
Evenings: Arthur's own lectures on political philosophy.
He did not preach monarchy or religion.
He taught:
– the French Revolution
– the Rights of Man
– Rousseau's Social Contract
– Smith's Wealth of Nations
– and the early pulses of nationalism and republican thought.
During a lesson on revolutionary France, he would ask—lightly, as though discussing the weather:
"Tell me, gentlemen… if a sovereign grows blind to suffering, his ministers decadent, his people hungry—do they not possess the right, even the duty, to correct the fate of their nation with their own hands?"
The young men debated fervently.
Seeds were planted.
Old loyalties trembled.
Just as Arthur intended.
And then—Panama.
Arthur's scientific expedition, though ravaged by fever and tropical disease, returned with their colossal Survey and Feasibility Report on a Trans-Isthmian Canal. Drawings, soil analyses, tidal studies, rainfall logs—the thick volume smelled of jungle and ambition.
The conclusion was severe:
The undertaking would be monstrous.
The expense enough to humble empires.
The labour brutal beyond measure.
Yet…
Not impossible.
Arthur felt the same fire that had once driven Roman emperors to carve roads across continents.
If he could set the first stone of such a canal—
if Britain could command the artery between two oceans—
then the Empire would not merely influence the world.
It would anchor it.
He dipped his pen in red ink—brighter than any seal—and wrote across the report's cover:
"Commence preparations."