The Chornbook Mysteries: The Russian Dolls Mystery and other stories Book Five

By George Chornbrook

"Sire, a dispatch arrived from Paris. From Duc d'Otrante. Marked 'Extremely Urgent.'"

"What is it, Meneval?"

Claude-Francois Baron de Meneval took his time to respond.

"What is it?" Napoleon repeated impatiently.

"Murder, Sire. Lady Margaret, the Empress's lady-in-waiting, was found dead in the antechamber at the Empress's bedroom. Madame Josephine is extremely upset. She believed that Lady Margaret prevented the assassination attempt by the price of her own life..."

She could be his wife, but she was not. He could be her husband, but he was not.

Something came across the lives of those two people: Kevin Harrison and Lionna Dorset, making it impossible to think about marriage.

It was the murder of her uncle, George Dorset the Fifth, a wealthy shipowner.

Brian pulled out one of his favorite Cuban cigars, chopped off the end of the cigar with a silver cutter, and used a silver lighter to bring a small blue flame to lit it.

"Let us say I came here posthaste to save a certain fair lady from a destiny worse than death."

"Meaning?" Looking to the skies, Alice drew from her Turkish cigarette in an ivory holder.

"Jail," said Brian laconically, and sent a string of perfect smoke rings to the air, one after another.

"Jail?" Her laugh was like a silver bell. "Who would dare to arrest Princess Alice Menshikoff, the grandniece of the czar?"

"No one." Brian nodded. "But they would gladly arrest Nancy Walker from Chicago."

"Poor girl," murmured Alice. "I already feel sorry for her. What has she done, Brian?"

"There were a couple of bank robberies in Chicago three months ago on the tune of two million dollars in gold..."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889820543

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

The Tiara of Borgias, Part One: The Murder in the Tuileries

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

The Tiara of Borgias, Part Two: The Mystery of Two Ships

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The Russian Dolls Mystery

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

The Blonde and The Beacher

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

The Waiter and The Maiden

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

The Other Lane Always Moves Faster

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

The Mystery of the Lost Glove

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

About the Author

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The Chornbook Mysteries

The Russian Dolls Mystery and other stories Book Five

George Chornbrook

Copyright © 2023 George Chornbrook

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 979-8-88982-053-6 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89221-311-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88982-054-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To my lovely granddaughter Daniella, who is the enigma in her own right

The Tiara of Borgias, Part One: The Murder in the Tuileries

The Murder in the Tuileries

Introduction

December 1805

Paris, France

At the beginning of the new XIX century, the center of the world shifted from Rome to Paris. The year 1800 marked the end of the excesses of the French Revolution and the victorious wars waged by the young general. The future Emperor had provided France with security and her capital, Paris, with glamour through gold paid by the defeated countries.

The hotels and private houses had hosted the nobility from Italy, the Holy Roman Empire that would soon become just the Empire of Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary—and even Russia.

The English aristocracy, attracted by that glamor of la vie Parisienne nouvelle, would come to Paris with American passports.

Also, while he was still the Citizen First Consul, the Emperor pardoned about forty thousand French émigrés.

They returned to France to find out that their palaces had been ransacked and their wealth was gone, and there were many new customs, and even the language itself became foreign for the people returning to France after ten or fifteen years of exile.

And at the same time, the Revolution and then the Emperor created a new aristocracy, the aristocracy of the sword and money.

As Aristotle noticed, Nature abhors a vacuum.

The Emperor made his marshals the dukes and kings, and the enriched army contractors and bankers became barons and knights.

O tempora, o mores!

There were daily balls in the palaces of new aristocrats where the women dressed in semitransparent tunics à la ancient Rome, with huge diamond and pearl necklaces—sometimes the only cover their breasts had—and bracelets and earrings with diamonds and rubies.

Somehow, the Emperor was incensed by that fashion, at least before his coronation when he tried to maintain his image as the Republican General. The journals had printed a story that the Citizen First Consul ordered the servants to build up such a fire in the drawing room of Fontainebleau that the inside temperature reached an oven-like level. As Napoleon explained later, It was freezing, and our ladies were almost naked.

The clever Josephine, his wife and the future Empress, got the hint and inaugurated a new fashion, a new dress code of a somewhat more modest nature.

But new fashion took over menfolk as well. The blue, green, and even orange tailcoats replaced the monotonous black and brown ones. The snow-white waistcoats accompanied by huge cravats and tight breeches, later introduced by Beau Brummell in London, came to Paris after crossing the English Channel.

Even the men's hairdo was changed. A Londoner with the imprudence to trust his hairdo to a Paris hairdresser found that his powdered pigtail was cut off, his hair was cut short, and false sideburns were glued to his cheeks.

At that time, the day of the Paris beau monde would start at noon and end well after midnight. The foreigners were shocked to find out that no dinner would be served before 8:00 p.m., followed by the attendance of a performance in one of the multiple Paris theaters.

Many restaurants would stay open to dawn and offer the most sophisticated dishes and wines to men in uniforms or tight breeches accompanied by their half-naked mistresses.

Finally, on December 2, 1804, a glorious and unprecedented ceremony took place in Paris: the coronation of Emperor Napoleon I.

And Mme Josephine Beauharnais, the wife of the Citizen First Consul and known as Citizen Bonaparte, became Empress Josephine.

After the coronation, the referral citizen all but disappeared except among hard-core revolutionaries.

And Joseph Fouché, the former Montagnard and the Butcher of Lyon and now the Minister of Police, became the Duc d'Otrante. Citizen Louis Bonaparte, the Emperor's younger brother and the former chairman of the National Assembly, became the king of Holland, and Marshal Bernadotte became the king of Swedes.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose…

It was no secret that no love was lost between the Emperor's family, his brothers and sisters, and Josephine; all hated Josephine even after Louis married her daughter Hortense.

It became known that the Emperor's sisters, Elisa and Caroline, were offended by the title of queen, which Napoleon bestowed on Josephine after his coronation as the king of the Italians.

A gossip circulated across the courts of Europe that when Napoleon elevated his brother Louis and made him the king of Holland, Caroline, the wife of Marshal Murat whom the Emperor made King of Naples, burst into tears because Napoleon addressed Louis's wife, Hortense, as Princess Louis and to her just as Mme Murat!

Suddenly, all the Emperor's family, the descendants of impoverished Corsican nobility, became more snobbish than the English royalty.

Chapter 1

Sunday, December 8, 1805

Rue de la Victoire, Paris

Oh, Serge, I love you so much. Do you love me?

These words were addressed to a tall man in civil clothes but with the deportment of a military man and the mustache that only an army man would have.

They were in a bedroom on the second floor of a small house surrounded by a garden and separated by a high stone wall from another small place on the same street.

Many mirrors and tapestries hung from the walls, some with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and fresh flowers filled the floor vases.

The man stayed near the wall mirror that reflected a bed where a young woman was lying down. She was young—very young, maybe nineteen—and in her eyes, all her love and passion reflected with such a force that only the first love could make.

He turned around, came close to the bed, bent over and hugged her, and kissed her with a long kiss, so long that she lost her breath. He looked into her eyes and said, Yes, I love you. I love you very much. But in his voice was more chagrin than joy.

What are we going to do, Serge?

I do not know. I do not want to return, and I cannot stay here.

Why don't we run? Together, on the earth's end?

He looked at her thoughtfully. You know, maybe we will. But we will need money. Our travel could be long and dangerous.

I do not care. I do not want to stay here either. We can run to my father's castle and from there to Italy.

They will hunt me down. And they kill us both. Because they are scared, they scared of the Emperor, of France, of Liberty.

Oh, Serge, do not be so gloomy. Tell me again that you love me.

He kissed her again.

You know, I still think about that evening at the Opera. So strange, I was with a man I have known all my life. But it was you, and I was looking at you, and you were sitting with that woman and that fat man pretending to be her father. She is his mistress, right? And you?

Oh, darling, let us not talk about it. It is all so dirty.

But you do not love her, no? Please, Serge, it has hurt me to think.

He did not let her finish by kissing her again.

She sighed. It is time already. Will I see you next Sunday? You know, she has so much jewelry. One necklace would pay for our way to the earth's end. But it will be a sin and will not give us a moment of happiness.

Do not even think about it. I know a man who would lend us money and who will wait as long as it will take for us to repay our debt. I will talk to him, and I will let you know. Next Sunday, darling. I wish it would come tomorrow.

He kissed her again and then used the back-door staircase to walk out of the house to the garden. And soon, he disappeared behind the wall.

Chapter 2

December 13, 1805

The Folly

In a fashionable and elegant part of Paris called the Chaussee D'Antin, the place close to the theaters and the palaces, a small house on the Rue de la Victoire was called Hotel Beauharnais.

It was where financiers, merchants, and even famous actors—what they called la bourgeoisie—built during the eighteenth century charming little houses called follies because of the foliage in this area. The main attribute of the folly was a garden with trees and shrubs surrounding it from three sides, a cobblestone path leading to the door, and a high wall separating the yard from the neighbors.

In 1798, Napoleon bought No. 6 on Rue de la Victoire, the first and the last house the Emperor owned as a private citizen.

It was in this house where General Bonaparte met Josephine de Beauharnais three years earlier, and it was that house where he married her the following year. At that time, its street address was No. 6, Rue Chantereine (Chanting Frogs), because of the old moat not far away, but in 1798, some revolutionary purists were offended by the -reine that sounded like reign (the queen) and demanded the street to be renamed (sounds familiar, n'est-pas?).

After the First Consul and his wife moved to the Petit Luxembourg Palace in 1802, the No. 6 Rue de la Victoire stood closed. Since then, only an old soldier and his wife would come once a week on Fridays to open the doors and proceed with the usual weekly chores of dusting rooms and furniture that were stayed as is, without linen covers.

In summer, they would do some gardening, trying to preserve the plants that Mme Beauharnais planted with so much care and consideration before her position as the wife of the First Consul and later as the Empress made her move to Tuileries. They would fill the vases on the first and second floors with fresh flowers from the garden, exactly as they had done all these years.

They will also collect multiple letters left on the porch addressed to the Empress that would accumulate over a week as they continued to arrive daily for unknown reasons. They would put these letters on the table in the living room and express neither interest nor surprise when these letters would disappear before their next visit.

The police kept an eye on that folly, as would the police of any country when it was about royalty, whether future, present, or past.

What would attract the attention of an occasional passerby walking along that street in the early morning—actually before dawn—on December 15, 1805, would be unusual activity in house No. 8, next to the Hotel Beauharnais, where two carriages—each with two horses, not elegant fiacres the bourgeoisie already used in 1805 but pre-revolutionary robust carts—were loaded up to the roof.

Two lackeys were bringing new packages and boxes, and eventually, the passengers—two men and a woman—took their places inside: the man and the woman in the first carriage, and the other man took place in the second one. Finally, the lackeys climbed on the coach planks, and the cavalcade moved as fast as the horses could drag their load.

If this passerby entered the villa through the door left wide open, he would find out that the movers left behind nothing except bare walls. Later, when the police started investigating certain actions of the former tenants, they discovered that all furniture was sold for half-price, and all household items were also sold. At the same time, a fireplace was filled with ashes, suggesting that a large amount of paper was burned.

In their daily reports to the prefect, the police would mention the names of the tenants: Count Naryshkin, his daughter Countess Julia, and her husband, Capt. Serge Kalugin.

But that passerby would be surprised even more if, on the next day, he happened to be nearby and saw several police carriages arriving at that place, and later to find out that a platoon of dragoons was sent in hot pursuit of the former tenants.

Chapter 3

December 16, 1805

Vienna, Austria

Sire, a dispatch arrived from Paris. From Duc d'Otrante. Marked ‘Extremely Urgent.'

What is it, Meneval?

Claude-Francois Baron de Meneval had become the Emperor's personal secretary only a year ago after Maurice Bourienne, Napoleon's childhood and school friend, was accused of embezzlement of government money and resigned. Now he took his time to respond.

What is it? Napoleon repeated impatiently.

Murder, Your Imperial Majesty. Lady Margaret, the Empress's lady-in-waiting, was found dead in the antechamber at the Empress's bedroom. Madame Josephine was extremely upset. She believed that Lady Margaret prevented the assassination attempt by the price of her own life.

Napoleon nervously stood up, snatched the dispatch, and went to the window, where the sunrise illuminated trees and statues in the park of Shönbrunn Palace in Vienna.

It was early morning of December 16, just two weeks after the Battle at Austerlitz, which ended with a crash the second anti-France coalition of Austria and Russia.

In the battle, Russia lost about thirty thousand dead and captured soldiers, and two Emperors were running for their lives, pursued by French hussars. It was the battle and the place that Napoleon predicted a year in advance, where he said he would meet and beat the Russians.

The secretary kept silent. With his knowledge of Napoleon's obsession with Josephine, he expected an outburst of rage that made all European royalty shudder with fear.

At the European royal courts, they still whispered about that episode in 1799 during a peace treaty negotiation between France and the Holy Roman Empire that soon became just the Empire of Austria.

There Napoleon grabbed a cherished porcelain tea set presented by Russian Empress Ekaterina II to Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire Count Coblentz and crushed it on the floor just because the count dared to object to some points of the treaty.

Now in 1805, a new peace treaty was set to be signed between the Austrian and French Emperors, the treaty on terms set by Napoleon—to the great chagrin of the Buckingham Palace at the court of St. James after the British Treasury spent millions of pounds in another attempt to crash Napoleon.

So great was the disappointment in Great Britain and so strong was public opinion against Prime Minister William Pitt that the only consolation, if any, that his country had was the fact of his sudden death.

But the Russian Emperor Alexander I had escaped from the battlefield while being pursued by Murat's hussars and consequently had eliminated Russia as a party of the treaty.

As a premonition of a defeat, the long-term Chancellor of the Russian Empire, Count Vorontsov, died on the day of the battle.

Napoleon never gave any credit to Russia, the Russian people, or the Russian Emperor. For him, Russia never belonged to Europe.

Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tatar under its skin, he said once.

He despised Russian Emperor Alexander for his duplicity, for planning a new coalition against the French Emperor even as they said the ink did not dry yet in his signature under the last peace treaty.

All of Napoleon's prejudices were against Great Britain, and he considered multiple assassination plots as the intrigues of the Court of St. James—the prejudices not shared by Duc d'Otrante, his powerful Minister of Police who, through his multitude of informants, knew that it was royalists as the primary and most deadly enemies of the Emperor.

Of course, Great Britain had a particular interest in crushing Napoleon. Besides pure economic problems created by Napoleon with his Continental Blockade, which locked the European markets to colonial goods, cutting a huge part of profits for the British Empire, there were grave concerns about republican ideas spread by the French Revolution in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

Just twenty years ago, England lost one of the most profitable colonies in North America to a group of slave owners who proclaimed the necessity of the republican revolution as a response to monarchy. Now the Corsican, as they call Napoleon in the London newspapers, practically cut off Europe.

The opposition to the ideas of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite united the European monarchs, for the time being, forgetting their mutual hostilities.

Great Britain put her money on Russia with its enormous human potential. The His Majesty Treasury paid one hundred gold rubles to Czar Alexander for every recruit to the Russian Army.

The Russian losses under Austerlitz were fifteen thousand killed and wounded and twelve thousand captured. It means the czar would bill HM British Treasury for a cool 2.7 million rubles in gold.

It was not what London's Burse expected. And it was not what the Russian nobility wanted. Because for Russian landowners, it meant that new thousands of ample body men would be dragged by the recruiters from their villages to the dismay of local squires whose sole livelihood and livelihood of their families depended entirely on serf labor.

That was the background of the European situation in the aftermath of Austerlitz.

And now that news from Paris, the capital of his empire.

Napoleon turned away from the window, and the secretary was struck by the deadly pallor of the Emperor's face.

"Write to him, Meneval, that I expect that murder to be explained before my return to Paris and the criminals arrested. Then, I will write to the Empress and ask her to care more for herself.

Also, the palace guard must be completely replaced. But let him do it carefully under the pretext of routine troop rotation. The duke would know what to do. You will send all letters with the same courier.

The secretary bowed and left, wondering what form Napoleon's wrath would take—and knowing that whatever it would take would be terrible. However, it was out of the Emperor's character to be so sangfroid when Josephine's safety was jeopardized, so the tempest was only postponed.

Chapter 4

December 18, 1805

St. Petersburg, Russia

A dispatch from Paris, Your Excellency. From Count Naryshkin.

It was a cold day in St. Petersburg. Outside, the smoke from a hundred chimneys hung heavily in the frozen air. But a Dutch stove and the burning birch logs provided comfortable warm air in the office of the Chancellor of the Russian Empire, Count Rumyantzev.

What did Naryshkin write? asked the count while continuing his writing without looking at his secretary.

Paris celebrates the victory. In newspapers, Napoleon is extolled as the second Alexander the Great. There are balls, public dinners, and fireworks. Rush between army suppliers and bankers to secure new contracts. As usual, most of them appealed to Josephine, asking for recommendation letters.

It could be expected. Anything more of a substance?

Napoleon ordered Prince Talleyrand—and Josephine—to arrive at Pressburg at once. General Augerau is already there, checking the security settings.

Count Nikolai Rumyantzev got up from the table and went to the window. He had been the Russian minister of foreign affairs and became in charge of Russian foreign policy just two weeks ago following the sudden death of Chancellor Count Vorontsov.

"His Imperial Majesty Czar Alexander had returned from Warsaw yesterday. We are left without any allies. Emperor Francis was expected to arrive in Pressburg shortly.

His Majesty is feeling the deep humiliation not only because of the defeat, which was squarely the result of the total incompetence of the Austrian generals, but because the Corsican has the temerity to call him ‘My brother,' him who is the Romanoff and the direct descendant of Prince Rurik.

The count spoke, looking out the window at the snowy square in front of the Winter Palace where the guard was changing. The fact that Napoleon is taking his foreign minister with him means that conditions will be dire. And the fact that he wants his Creole to join him means he will celebrate. Too bad for that fat slob Francis—he would lose his lands and have to kiss the hand of the Creole.

His secretary, Gen. Dmitry Kazalin, listened respectfully to the chancellor of the Russian Empire.

The count sighed. Anything else?

Yes, Your Excellency. Prince Dolgorukov, our ambassador in Vienna, had sent a report: three hundred Russian prisoners of war died in the castle where they were placed in a cold hall at a freezing temperature. The windows were locked, so they all perished from smoke inhalation when they set a fire in the fireplace. The Austrians insisted that it was an unfortunate accident.

Prepare the protest to the Austrian ambassador. Make it strong, and accuse them of gross negligence if not of premeditated crime. Next?

There could be some complications in Corsican's plans, Your Excellency.

How come, Dmitry Vasilyevich?