A young merchant's wife, a millionaire widow, the owner of a large block of shares in the Volga-Ural Shipping Company, is looking for an assistant in purchasing an estate. She turns to Alexey Ivanovich Shumilov, a famous St. Petersburg lawyer, and also a detective, a kind of Russian Sherlock Holmes. A major transaction requires special care and professionalism. But is there a catch here? Why does a poorly educated merchant's wife need an estate worth a million? The restless Alexey Shumilov learns that the husband of the newly rich woman recently died under strange and scandalous circumstances. He begins to unwind the ball, and soon realizes that the threads of this ball are stained with blood. Whose? To answer this question, a truly royal expertise is needed... All events actually took place in 1889 in Rostov-on-Don.