A Fashionable Fatality


 
 
 
 
 Table of Contents
 
 Also by
 Title Page
 
 Copyright Page
 Dedication
 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
 CHAPTER 15
 CHAPTER 16
 CHAPTER 17
 CHAPTER 18
 CHAPTER 19
 CHAPTER 20
 AUTHOR’S NOTE
 
 
 
 
 Books by Alyssa Maxwell 
 
 
 Gilded Newport Mysteries MURDER AT THE BREAKERS MURDER AT MARBLE HOUSE MURDER AT BEECHWOOD MURDER AT ROUGH POINT MURDER AT CHATEAU SUR MER MURDER AT OCHRE COURT MURDER AT CROSSWAYS MURDER AT KINGSCOTE MURDER AT WAKEHURST MURDER AT BEACON ROCK 
 
 
 Lady and Lady’s Maid Mysteries MURDER MOST MALICIOUS A PINCH OF POISON A DEVIOUS DEATH A MURDEROUS MARRIAGE A SILENT STABBING A SINISTER SERVICE A DEADLY ENDOWMENT A FASHIONABLE FATALITY 
 
 
 
 Published by Kensington Publishing Corp. 
 
 
 AUTHOR’S NOTE 
 With the exception of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the characters in this story are entirely fictional. 
 Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1893, into a home marked by extreme poverty. After her mother’s death, her father, a peddler, placed her in an orphanage, where the nuns taught her how to sew. As a young woman, she discovered she could earn a living by singing in cabarets, and it’s said her nickname came from this time, from a particular song she sang onstage. Chanel, however, was known to explain that Coco was short for coquette. Young, attractive, and intelligent, she also secured her fortunes by attaching herself to wealthy men. One of those men, Étienne Balsan, a socialite and heir to an industrialist (and later the brother-in-law of Consuelo Vanderbilt) helped her start a milliner’s shop in Paris before WWI, where she would put those sewing skills to good use. Her hats were innovative, and wealthy women wanted them. 
 It was during her affair with Balsan that Chanel also became involved with Arthur “Boy” Capel, an English aristocrat who helped her expand her business beyond hats and into the world of haute couture. Their affair lasted nine years, even after Capel married. It’s said the two intertwining Cs of the Chanel logo are a combination of their last initials. He died in a car accident in 1919, and by Chanel’s own admission many years later, she never fully recovered from his death. But there were other influential men in her life. Igor Stravinsky, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Westminster were among her conquests, as well as Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of Czar Nicholas, who had escaped Russia during the revolution. 
 Chanel’s association with the latter two men would influence her clothing designs. With Pavlovitch, she embraced the square necklines and elaborate embroidered trim of Russian peasant clothing. Thanks to the Duke of Westminster, with whom she traveled in England, she saw the potential in men’s classic tweed attire for creating comfortable yet sophisticated clothing for women. I took a liberty by creating a fictional character in place of the duke, and also with the timing, setting the relationship and trip a few years earlier than in actuality. But by the mid-1920s, Chanel had cloth manufacturers in the UK producing what would become her signature tweed fabrics. 
 So, why did an intelligent, ambitious woman with brilliant business sense and an innovative eye for fashion need to align herself with one powerful man after another? One might suppose it was because for a woman to succeed in those days, she needed the help of men. However, with Chanel the reasons went deeper. Her early life, with its poverty and what she perceived as abandonment, was, for her, a source of humiliation she sought to conceal behind a fictional narrative she constructed later. Through the men she associated with, she hoped to find the stability, protection, status, and esteem she lacked as a child. Was there something of a delusional quality to these relationships in that she hoped to elevate herself, through marriage, to a position where she would no longer be vulnerable—such as a duchess, or, in the event the Russian Revolution failed and Pavlovitch took the throne, czarina? There is evidence to suggest she entertained such ambitions. However, Coco Chanel never married. 
 What was she like? As I mentioned above, she was ambitious and brilliant, and fiercely focused on her goals. She could be generous to a fault, supporting friends and opening her homes to them. She could also be selfish, indifferent, and ruthless. She was less than sympathetic toward her many employees, who referred to her simply as Mademoiselle. She was a homophobe. An anti-Semite. During WWII and the years leading up to the war, she proved herself to have no loyalties except to her own profits, no sense of morality but what benefited herself. 
 So why make her integral to the plot of this book? A couple of reasons. For one, the Coco Chanel of the early 1920s was still a largely unknown quantity. She had yet to show her true colors, but she was unmistakably an important component of society’s post–WWI push into the modern world, where women could be comfortable in their own clothing, and where, despite lingering obstacles, they were venturing out into the business world in ways never seen before. Such themes are in keeping with those I’ve been following throughout this series. 
 And two, the notion of hero worship always gives me pause. Whether it’s a sports figure, celebrity, politician, etc., I have come to feel the worshiper will always find reasons, in the end, to be disappointed. Even to feel a sense of abandonment and betrayal on the part of the person they had admired. Just as Julia does by the end of the story. Coco Chanel spearheaded a business that has lasted more than a century, that more than once changed the very nature of women’s fashion, in ways that both reflected