1847
"Haisenwei" or "Vladivostok"
It would soon turn out that the Mandarin cared about the little harbor well enough after all. Russian and Chinese relations had already declined after the local alliance against the Turkics of the Tarim Basin and Central Asia ended in acrimony. Even then, the two parties could claim to have gotten what they wanted from the understanding: Russia conquered the Steppe while China evicted the Turkic peoples from the Tarim Basin in northwestern China.
But the arrival of Russian settles and soldiers Haisenwei was such an affront that the Emperor was already livid even BEFORE he received the perfunctory letter from the arrogant commander of the Russian squatters. The Chinese Court felt that they had been more than reasonable in politely demanding the Russians depart the region...or else. They didn't even specify the "or else" and THAT was downright reasonable on the part of Beijing. But the continued intransigence would prove to cost Russia dearly.
A century and a half earlier, China and Russia had reached an accord that the so-called "Stanovoy" Mountains would be the border between the two nations. Certainly, China saw nothing it WANTED in the cold wastes that wasn't fit even for Mongolians. But, slowly and without a particularly binding treaty, the Russian encroached southwards and eventually made the Amur River the defacto border. In truth, China didn't care overly much as the Mandarin had a series of conquests to achieve, the Opium peddlers to crush and internal reform to complete. Fighting over a land China didn't even WANT seemed silly. Besides, the Russians only moved a few tens of thousands of people into the region and this was hardly a threat to China.
But the arrogant attitude towards the Middle Kingdom could not go unanswered. An expedition was dispatched that easily seized control of the region from the petty Russian garrison. The Chinese commander took one look and wondered why the Emperor even bothered. While the harbor was indeed fine, there seemed to be no benefit to China of controlling it. China had dozens of warmer harbors to the south with which to maintain trade...if the Emperor cared about external trade, which was waning apparently.
While Haisenwei was being reclaimed, Manchurian forces marched northwards across the Amur, seizing the equally pitiful settlements. The Russians were forced to the coastal towns and ordered to depart. Of course, ships were not in plentiful supply and some officers recommended killing every Russian they encountered. Fortunately, the new governor forbade such conduct and instead ordered that Chinese Junks deliver these peoples to either Russian America or those islands in the middle of the ocean....errrr....the Hawayans or something. Within two years, the lands south of the Stonovoy chain were emptied of Russians and a campaign by the Emperor to plant Manchurian "settlers" to this remote region would see it immediately repopulated with even more people (Han Chinese were forbidden from settling in Manchuria thus prompting the Emperor to command tens of thousands of his Manchu people to locate in the region).
Given the enormous distances, communication between Moscow and Beijing was extremely difficult and official declarations of war would only be delivered in 1848. By this point the war was spreading.
1848
Southern-Eastern Siberia
The southern Siberian towns of Chita, Ulan-Ude and Irkutsk had been settled in the past century or so as Russia expanded inexorably East. By 1848, most had been officially given "city" status, they were, in all reality, still modest in scale. These towns were intended as the stopping points between western Russia and the tiny ports of the east. In truth, the ports in Russian control had long been remote and frozen over most of the year (thus prompting the desire for a Vladivostok). These towns were better utilized for gathering furs from the vast territories to the north than any other function.
In short order, large mobile Chinese armies rode northwards. The Bannermen of Chinese, Manchurian and Mongol extraction were armed with modern rifles but maintained the mobility of the ancient Mongolian Hordes. The remote Siberian towns had no conceivable defense and fell immediately. Fortunately, the commanders, seeing the ease of their victory, summarily ordered the Russians west rather than executing the inhabitants.
By the end of 1848, the Czar's people had effectively been evicted from the lands east of Lake Baikal.
Sakhalin
Though both Russia and Nippon had attempted to claim Sakhalin Island over the years, it remained a distant tribute state to China. Seeing no reason for further ambiguity, the Chinese government formally announced that the Island was the Emperor's personal property....and promptly forgot about it deeming the place unworthy of sending a garrison.
Copenhagen
The King of Denmark, Norway, Hanover, Schleswig and Holstein had quietly allowed his people to run their own lives. However, when a German by the name of Friedrich Engels (who was hiding in Denmark having made himself unwelcome in his homeland) wrote an inflammatory pamphlet in 1848, the King decided to send Engels and his friend Marx to a prison colony in the West Indies, the infamous St. Barts.
While a French island, the French government had long leased it out to foreign nations to serve as a prison island. England, prior to her dismemberment into a half dozen nations, had leased it for decades. When Britain had no further use, the French government leased it to a private concern which, in turn, offered to hold assorted prisoners which foreign governments desired to be far from their shores, often for political reasons.
St. Barts' prison was rebuilt and dozens of European nations suddenly were happy to find a place to exile men they'd convicted but could not, for some reason, hang and certainly didn't want them near their own publics.
Once again, St. Barts would emerge as the worst prison on earth and men such as the German rabble-rousers Engels and Marx, the Irish sodomite Oscar Wilde and their ilk were locked away from 1840 through 1892, when the prison officially closed. Most would never leave the island.
Greenland
The drunken doctor belched several times before pronouncing the tumor on James John Smith's neck malignant and terminal. The old soldier saw no reason to dispute this as he was hardly a doctor and already lived longer than one could reasonably expect given his hard life.
Smith would quietly mumble his thanks and return to his quarters, a twenty by twenty foot earthen mound absurdly doubling as his private quarters and the "Company Headquarters".
For the past two years, Smith had begged for relief but his entreaties were ignored. There was no sadder place on earth than this absurdly named "Greenland" that His Majesty deemed worthy of purchasing from Denmark. His only comfort was a plump native woman who shared his bed at night and he had yet to comprehend a word she said.
Only a week after his terminal prognosis, Smith would receive his summons home. His years of service (if not actual QUALITY of service) was deemed adequate for his officer's pension. Smith would laugh at the irony. Given a death sentence, he was now offered his due pension. Still, he would return home in late 1848, settling in the Dominion of Virginia, the home he dared not return to for so many decades. Deciding that anyone recognizing him were long odds indeed (and no longer caring if they did), Smith returned home. He brought along his native mistress, who would give birth on the voyage to the mainland to a son.
Uncertain how long he had left, Smith wondered what to do. Finally, having hidden his true identity for so many years, Armstrong Hyman Thruston decided to gather up his memoirs and confess to his actions, not conceding that he was wrong but wanting the world to know the manner in which he suffered for forty years after the failed assassination of King Frederick resulted in the death of George Washington.
"Smith" had endured the privation of battle with the western tribes, marooning in the Bahama Islands, nearly being trampled by a River Cow near New Orleans, losing one million pounds sterling to a one-legged bandit in the southwest and finally being stationed in a northern hell. What more could the law or the Crown or God himself inflict upon him that hadn't already occurred? Besides, with one foot in the grave, the soldier at least wanted the world to understand.
1849
Richmond, Virginia
Upon returning to Richmond, Smith would strike up a friendship with a local actor named Junius Booth who owned a local theater. Booth and his wife had a large family of ten children, the elder boys already entering the acting profession. One of the younger boys, John Wilkes Booth, would run errands about town for the ailing Smith.
While Smith was no great writer, he'd read a great deal over the years and solicited help from Booth regarding the "later" years of his life, namely after he'd changed his name and embarked upon a series of misadventures. Booth would happily assist in the effort, finding the story mesmerizing.
He agreed to help write the book upon two conditions:
1. That he would receive half the profits from publishing.
2. That he may write a play on the epic.
"Smith" agreed on provision that he...or more likely his descendants as he now had a son....would receive half the royalties of the play. The deal was struck and a contract written up. A publisher would eagerly take up the contract and promised the full weight of their business to telling the tale, one they believed was so bizarre that it would likely be a success.
Of course, while Smith was recounting his life-journey to Booth, who did most of the writing, he left out the early years, intending to insert a few chapters in the beginning to the publishing house. The book was nearly done by mid 1849 when Booth's "hidden chapters" were inserted into the package intended for the publishing house. By this time, the growth on Smith's neck was so large that he scarcely believed he would survive much longer. Feeling he nothing more to lose, he handed the packet over to young John and bid him deliver it to the postal office for shipment to the New York publisher. Smith intended to be gone before the package ever reached New York.
However, the boy had been ordered by his father to deliver it to HIM, not the post office as Junius Booth was growing to suspect that Smith had an ulterior motive, perhaps even cheating Booth out of his share. Reading the "hidden chapters" for the first time that night, Booth would think long and hard before summoning the local magistrate.
Naturally, at first, the local magistrate disbelieved the assertion that the ridiculously unlucky James John Smith was, in fact, the infamous Armstrong Hyman Thruston. But, seeing that Booth was among the most respected men in Richmond, he solicited a warrant from the local judge. Being assured by Booth that this was, indeed, Smith's handwriting, he approved the warrant.
Still packing for a departure abroad (he was not planning on taking his mistress and son), Smith was astonished to find the Magistrate at his door with a warrant for his "consultation". He was taken away to the local jail as the charges were read in court. Most locals found the charges absurd but the Judge would solicit the opinion of those who knew the younger Armstrong Hyman Thruston in youth. These included a cousin which, by happenstance, served on the Virginia Court of Appeals, a neighbor who served as his town sheriff and a childhood friend who happened to be the Leader of the Virginia House of Burgesses. All three were summoned, vexed as the obvious absurdity of the situation and, having met the man, emerged from the jailhouse swearing that James John Smith was....indeed....Armstrong Hyman Thruston.
Given the wear upon his features, it would be likely that Thruston could have simply lied and refused to admit he knew these people. But the growth of his tumor on the neck had proceeded so rapidly in recent months that he assumed he'd never live to reach any foreign destination anyway. Thus, he greeted his old friends by name, spoke of old times and thoroughly convinced them of his identity.
Formal charges were made against the man and, in chains, Thruston was separated from his mistress and son and shipped promptly to Manhattan with a mountain of evidence. So heinous was the crime that Parliament itself was tasked with an investigation. A sitting Parliamentarian and solicitor from Maumee named Abraham Lincoln was placed in command of defending Thruston. Given that Thruston, loudly proclaiming he wouldn't live to see the end of the trial, simply could not be shut up, Lincoln's task was virtually impossible.
Thruston would decry the end of slavery, stating that he was fighting for the survival of America and that King Frederick was betraying his own people by bringing it to an end. In truth, Thruston had given up most of these ideas in his youth but somehow wanted to express a flair for the dramatic before a packed Parliamentary floor.
Like in Richmond, many if not MOST of Parliament assumed that this was some form of hoax. However, as the soldier brought witness after witness forward who knew him as Armstrong Hyman Thruston, and he promptly gave up hordes of information that only the true Thruston could possibly know, the public gradually came to accept that this was the attempted Regicide in the flesh, a man who disappeared forty years prior.
The final proof was when Thruston provided the actual pistol which killed George Washington which he kept for "sentimental reasons". A groove on the interior of the pistol barrel would make an identical mark on every bullet fired from her, a mark matched to that of the bullet that slew the General four decades prior (the bullet remaining in evidence all this time). A doctor from Virginia similarly scraped up records from Thruston's childhood that matched certain scars, namely a long scar along his ankle incurred in a juvenile mishap falling from a tree, a cut on the bridge of the nose from a schoolyard fight and an early appendectomy, which matched those on Thruston. Finally, copies of Thruston's handwriting, long held in evidence vaults from Washington's murder investigation, would be matched to Thruston's current handwriting...the one on the "hidden chapters" of his memoirs.
Once thought a lark, the evidence soon became overwhelming.
The attempted regicide had been caught.
Thruston, his tumor huge, declared he'd never see the noose. A doctor was sent to his prison. Ironically, the doctor was, of all things, a Negro named....James McCune Smith. Smith would take a quick look at the tumor and, with an smirk, pronounce that this was in fact a benign tumor and of no particular danger to Thruston.
All at once, the attempted Regicide realized he may yet face the noose after all for his crimes.
In the meantime, Junius Booth, who had taken the precaution of copying the "hidden chapters" of Thruston's memoir before handing it over to the authorities (he'd long held a copy of the chapters detailing the life of "James John Smith") would proceed to dispatch a copy to the publisher in New York who printed it in record time. Over a half a million copies were printed in the first edition alone, making the Booth and Thruston families enormously wealthy.
Similarly, Booth would commence writing a play upon the full memoir in which his son John Wilkes Booth would play the young Armstrong Hyman Thruston for years before packed houses in Richmond, Baltimore, Manhattan and as far as London. Per the agreement, half went to Thruston.
Of course Thruston was not to partake of the profits. As a criminal, his proceeds would go to his family. While he was technically liable to a civil case from the aggrieved parties, General Washington's heirs opted against seeking compensation from the estate.
As there was technically no law which prohibited a criminal or his heirs from profiting from a memoir or a play detailing his immoral acts, this left the proceeds from both to the Thruston heir, namely his half Inuit bastard son.
Thruston himself would face the full weight of the law and be found guilty and sentenced to death for his actions. However, King Henry II would receive a plea from the family of George Washington (both his closest nephew and his stepson Jackie) who pleaded for mercy. Seeing no reason for cruelty, the King sought advice from First Lord Poinsett and found a solution. He would commute the death sentence for Armstrong Hyman Thruston to life imprisonment.
To Thruston, this did not seem so bad. He was a celebrity and probably would have his own cell where he could receive visitors. However, he did not account for a recent agreement made between the government of British North America and the prison island of St. Barts in which men sentenced to life in prison were to be exiled to that remote location. Without a word to his mistress or toddler son (who he wouldn't want to speak to anyway), he was put on a ship for St. Barts, the hellish tropical destination reserved for boy-lovers, murderers and political exiles whose monarchs wanted them to suffer slowly rather than received the gift of a quick death.
In Manhattan, the Henry II was toasted for his mercy, pleading for the life of the man who sought his father's death. In private, the King and First Lord chuckled as the nightmarish existence Thruston would soon face under the merciless heat of the tropics.
Marvelous story, with a great ending that itself had some awesome turns! A black doctor, the tumor being benign, etc. were all great!