The Diamond Secret (Once Upon a Time) Read online

  A strong rap came at their door.

  “Girls, we need you now!” their father commanded. His tone was uncharacteristically loud and demanding. It galvanized the girls, including Anastasia, into a flurry of activity. In minutes they were out the door, walking rapidly between two bayonet-toting guards, along with the rest of their family, down the dimly lit hallway.

  “I’m scared,” Mashka whispered to Anastasia.

  “Don’t be,” Anastasia replied, reaching behind her to squeeze Mashka’s hand. “Everything will be fine.”

  “ONCE UPON A TIME”

  IS TIMELESS WITH THESE RETOLD TALES:

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2009 by Suzanne Weyn

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number 2008932846

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-9502-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-9502-1

  Visit us on the Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Rae Weyn Gonzalez, who always loved Anastasia best

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE Grim Memories in a Gray City

  CHAPTER TWO Headline News

  CHAPTER THREE A Girl Dressed in Goose Feathers

  CHAPTER FOUR An Insane Offer

  CHAPTER FIVE A Spy at the Station

  CHAPTER SIX An Imperial Dream

  CHAPTER SEVEN Fast Thinking

  CHAPTER EIGHT Moving Closer, Stepping Back

  CHAPTER NINE Changes

  CHAPTER TEN In the Night Forest

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Lessons in Royalty

  CHAPTER TWELVE Unexpected Developments

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Controversy

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Struggles

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN An Explosion of Diamonds

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Anastasia Is Presented

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Face at the Window

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Summoned to Paris

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The Dowager Empress Marie

  CHAPTER TWENTY Betrayed!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Showdown

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Story Unfolds

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Scarred Man’s Attack

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Revelations in the Night

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Elana Kremnikov

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Blood Memory

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Awake

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT The Diamond Secret

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Yekaterinburg, Russia

  Shortly after midnight, July 17, 1918

  “Get up, Anastasia! We have to get dressed. Hurry! Wake up!” Anastasia Romanov blinked hard, struggling to come awake. Why was her older sister Tatiana bending beside her bed, shaking her shoulder?

  Turning her head, she saw that her other two older sisters, Olga and Mashka, were rapidly changing from their white ruffled nightgowns into day clothes. Olga was quickly tucking her puff-sleeved blouse into her long, narrow blue skirt. Mashka tugged a long gray jumper over a blue blouse with belled sleeves. Olga had a ruffled blouse slung over her shoulder.

  This was very strange. Where could they be going?

  Anastasia checked the clock at her bedside. It was one in the morning! “What’s happening?” she murmured as she sat up.

  “The White Russian Army is coming to save us, just as Father said they would,” Olga told her, giddy with excitement.

  “We’re going to be out of this awful place soon!” Mashka exulted. “Thank goodness!”

  “It’s better here than it was in Siberia,” Anastasia pointed out as she swung her bare feet onto the cold wooden floor.

  “But not nearly as good as it was at the palace,” Olga countered. “I can’t wait to go home.”

  There came a knock on the door, and Tatiana opened it to their mother, an elegant woman whom all four of them resembled. She had delicate, fine-boned features and thick blond hair, which she wore piled on top of her head. Czarina Alexandra already had changed out of her nightclothes. “Girls, your father says to put on the special petticoats your grandmother had sewn for each of you.”

  “I thought those were just supposed to be for an emergency,” Olga questioned. “Aren’t we being saved?”

  “The Red Army is moving us, and we don’t want to leave the petticoats,” Czarina Alexandra explained calmly.

  “Why are they moving us?” Anastasia asked.

  “Don’t be thick,” Olga scolded her. “They’re making it difficult for the White Army to find us.”

  “I’ll show you who’s thick,” Anastasia cried. She leaped at her sister and tickled her ribs until both of them fell on the bed laughing.

  The czarina clapped her hands sharply. “Enough of your constant clowning, Anastasia!”

  Anastasia instantly wiped the smile from her face. Her mother was normally slow to anger, so she was clearly being very serious. “Sorry, Mother.”

  “Olga is correct. We are indeed being moved to keep the White Army from finding and rescuing us. At least, I presume so,” Czarina Alexandra informed them, “and though we are confident that those in the White Army who are loyal to us will be victorious, until then we must be careful.”

  “Careful of what?” Anastasia asked.

  A cloud of worry passed over her mother’s face. “Nothing in particular, but we are in the middle of a civil war, and in war anything can happen. So now hurry and put on those petticoats under your clothing. I will be back to get you shortly.”

  As soon as her mother had left, Anastasia tossed off her nightgown while her sisters got out of the clothing they’d already begun to put on. Tatiana found their petticoats at the bottom of a trunk they’d brought from the grand Peterhof Palace…into exile in Siberia, and now to their latest location, this drafty estate the Bolshevik Red Army had named “The House of Special Purpose.”

  The estate’s “special purpose,” Anastasia assumed, was to hold her father, Czar Nicholas, their mother, Alexandra, her siblings—her three sisters and younger brother, Alexei—and herself prisoner. Along with Alexei’s physician and several servants, the Imperial family had been here for months, captives of this peasant uprising. Their father had assured them that this revolution and their captivity would be over before the end of the year and now, it seemed, he had been right.

  Anastasia p
ulled on the full petticoat, made of white eyelet material from shoulder to waist and ruffled at the knee-length bottom. She noticed that she didn’t fill hers out nearly as well as her more curvaceous older sisters. “This is ridiculous! I’m already seventeen! When am I going to catch up to the rest of you?” she fretted, holding out the bodice of her petticoat and gazing down despairingly at it.

  “Probably never,” Mashka taunted, pulling her jumper back over her head.

  Anastasia swiped a roll of socks and a small rag doll off the dresser and stuck them in the bosom of the undergarment. “There!” she cried with a playful nod at her newly enhanced figure. “I’ve surpassed you already!”

  “Stop playing, Anastasia!” Tatiana scolded. “Get dressed.”

  A strong rap came at their door. “Girls, we need you now!” their father commanded. His tone was uncharacteristically loud and demanding. It galvanized the girls, including Anastasia, into a flurry of activity. In minutes they were out the door, walking rapidly between two bayonet-toting guards, along with the rest of their family, down the dimly lit hallway.

  “I’m scared,” Mashka whispered to Anastasia.

  “Don’t be,” Anastasia replied, reaching behind her to squeeze Mashka’s hand. “Everything will be fine.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Grim Memories in a Gray City

  Yekaterinburg, Russia

  April 1919

  Ivan Ivanovitch Navgorny’s dark eyes snapped open.

  Not that dream again! With darting glances he surveyed his shabby hotel room in the iron-mining town of Yekaterinburg. Convinced he truly was awake, he sighed with relief. The room was a pit, but it was better than his nightmare.

  Walking to the grimy window, Ivan pulled back the stained curtain and gazed out at the gray sky looming above the square industrial buildings. How eerie to return to this grim proletariat city on the border of Siberia, after swearing he’d never be back. He and Sergei had been here for less than a week, and it was already too long.

  Where was Sergei? His blanket had been tossed off the slumping couch where he’d slept. Ivan guessed that his friend probably had gone to finally pay their overdue hotel bill.

  Ivan rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Now that he was awake, Ivan recalled the dream only in fleeting images and murmured conversations, blessedly difficult to reconstruct. But even upon waking he could remember the gunfire in his dream, as it had been in real life.

  Ivan knew what terrible memory he was reliving in his sleep.

  He didn’t like to think of the event if it could be avoided. He shut it out so vigilantly, so utterly, in his conscious waking state that the memory’s only outlet was to creep in at night when he could not guard against it.

  Guard against it.

  Guarding.

  He’d been a guard in the Red Army stationed here in Yekaterinburg at The House of Special Purpose, a villa acting as a jailhouse for the exiled Russian royal family, the Romanovs. Guarding was what he’d thought he was doing—guarding the imprisoned Czar Nicholas; his wife, Czarina Alexandra; and their five children: the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Marie—whom they all called Mashka—and their younger brother, Alexei.

  Ivan had been a Red soldier with the Bolsheviks then, a true believer in the words of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky regarding the rights of the Russian workers. Those leaders had believed in the cause of communism and so did Ivan—at least he had believed in it back then.

  The one thing Ivan was thankful for was that he had been stationed outside the basement early that fateful July seventeenth in 1918. The White Russian Army loyal to the czar was advancing on Yekaterinburg, and he’d thought the royal family, their physician, and three of their servants were just being hidden downstairs to keep the White Army from liberating them.

  He’d had no idea what was about to happen.

  But he’d cringed outside the door in helpless disbelief when he’d heard the gunfire abruptly erupt, and he had imagined the horrible killings going on inside. Later, his imaginings had been augmented by unwelcome details told to him by soldiers who had fired the shots there in the basement. Ivan had tried to stopper his ears, to shut out their stories, but they had insisted, as though in an attempt to unload the burden of their own horror and guilt over what they’d done.

  He understood how the rumor that Anastasia was still alive had started. She must have survived the first round of shootings—all three sisters had. They’d worn petticoats with so many jewels sewn into the waistbands that the gems had served as a kind of body armor, causing the bullets to bounce all over the room. Ivan’s soldier comrades had told him that they themselves had had to jump away, shielding their heads, to avoid being struck.

  There were no bouncing bullets the second time the soldiers fired.

  When the dust had cleared, Czar Nicholas, Czarina Alexandra, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Mashka, and Anastasia were all found lying silently in a heap.

  Then the soldiers had collected the scattered jewels and had ripped at the seams of the dead family’s clothes, searching for more hidden treasure, which they found. Then they had enlisted Ivan’s help to take the bodies to the woods to bury.

  In the woods, Ivan had stood guard beside the body of Anastasia while the other soldiers had dug graves. Her hair was over her face. Her summer dress had been torn away and now revealed the waist of her bullet-scorched petticoat.

  Before that moment, Ivan had seen Anastasia only at a distance as she walked in the garden of The House of Special Purpose. Back then, he hadn’t been able to get a close look at her, but he could tell she was a lively soul from the way her slim form danced along the walkways with her sisters, sometimes teasing, often laughing.

  To see her so still…it was a horror that had sickened him to the very depths of his being.

  Stepping away, Ivan had vomited heavily into a bush.

  When he turned back, his heart had skipped.

  Anastasia—the corpse he’d viewed just a moment before—was pulling herself forward, clawing her way across the dirt.

  He’d watched in speechless disbelief, wondering if he possibly could be imagining it.

  Tensing as she sensed him watching her, Anastasia had stopped and swung her head around to him.

  Through the tangle of hair that veiled most of her face, her eyes had spoken to him, begging him not to reveal her.

  He gave his tacit agreement by turning his back to her and bending forward, pretending to heave his guts out once more.

  Ivan never questioned his complicity in her escape, not even for a second. If she could manage, by some implausible combination of ferocious will and improbable luck, to escape this atrocious and premature death, he would not be the one to alert the others. The true believer in the Communist cause he had once been had died, just as surely as the Romanovs had been slaughtered.

  Glancing back, he had seen that she was getting farther away.

  The summer breeze rustled the leaves.

  The other soldiers were busy digging.

  Below them the Islet River rushed downstream.

  Occasionally a soldier’s shovel clanged when it hit a rock.

  Peering over his shoulder, Ivan had glanced at her again. Anastasia was on her knees about five yards from her family. Don’t stand up. Keep crawling, he’d thought, wishing he could warn her directly. But she’d staggered to her feet.

  And no one had noticed.

  Maybe by some miracle she might—

  “Hey!” a soldier had shouted. A shot rang through the woods.

  Her slim form had shuddered with the impact, her arm flying up as the bullet hit her in the chest, and then her body had slumped to the ground.

  Everything around Ivan had begun to spin. This was too much! Too much! He had to get out of there.

  He’d put down his rifle and walked into the woods. Vaguely, Ivan knew soldiers were shouting after him. He was even aware of a bullet whistling past his ear. But he’d just kept walking.

  Ivan shook off t
his painful memory as somewhere in town a factory whistle blew, signaling the start of the workday. These forays into the past were not welcome, and he did not succumb to them often. He was all about the future now—his future.

  He walked over to the small sink and peered into the oval mirror above it. His wavy, dark brown hair was getting long, falling nearly to his shoulders. He ran his hand over the scruffy three-day stubble covering his strong chin and high cheekbones. I should shave and get a haircut, he considered, his straight, dark brows furrowing as he bent in closer to scrutinize his face. With a careless shrug, he decided not to bother. If their business here was successful, then he’d tend to his grooming. If not, there was no reason to care.

  Suddenly the door flew open and in burst a tall, broad-shouldered, burly man in his middle twenties. He ran his large hand across the top of his short-cropped blond hair. When he spied his friend, his clear, ice-blue eyes widened. “Come on, Ivan. We’re leaving right now!” Sergei said urgently, snapping up strewn clothing as he strode around the room. “Hurry!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Headline News

  Nadya stretched sleepily as she shuffled down the narrow stairs from her attic bedroom above The Happy Comrades Tavern. With her eyes half-shut, she scowled at the gray morning light that filtered through a grimy window. Six in the morning was an ungodly time to start work, especially since she hadn’t gotten to bed until two.

  She stepped into the empty main dining area, and a misty cloud of breath formed when she yawned. An involuntary shiver ran through her, and she rubbed her arms for warmth. This morning her first chore would be to relight the fire in the room’s big stone fireplace before her employer, Mrs. Zolokov, arrived. The woman hated entering a freezing building and would have an especially ratty temper all day if that happened.