The Diamond Secret
Read The Diamond Secret Online
Authors: Suzanne Weyn
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:
For Rae Weyn Gonzalez, who always loved Anastasia best
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Grim Memories in a Gray City
CHAPTER THREE: A Girl Dressed in Goose Feathers
CHAPTER FIVE: A Spy at the Station
CHAPTER SIX: An Imperial Dream
CHAPTER EIGHT: Moving Closer, Stepping Back
CHAPTER TEN: In the Night Forest
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Lessons in Royalty
CHAPTER TWELVE: Unexpected Developments
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-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
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
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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.
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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
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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 pulled 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."