Still there was no sound nearby, and she opened her eyes a little more and turned her head to see where she was, then gasped in terror. Someone was there. It was Peter Vasnetsov, the guard from the house. He was standing right by the truck, his eyes wide in shock to see that she was alive.

“Help me,” Maria pleaded in a whisper, her eyes fixed on his.

He glanced over to where the other guards were gathered, as if about to call them. Then he looked at her. In one swift movement he slid her off the back of the truck, pulling her legs from beneath the tarpaulin, then slung her over his shoulder and ran full tilt toward the edge of the forest.

Chapter 8

Sydney, October 20, 1973

VAL THREW TOGETHER A CHICKEN AND PINEAPPLE casserole from a recipe in Women’s Weekly. She’d serve it with boiled rice, and some leftover sponge roll for dessert. Tony always insisted on dessert.

She cleaned the kitchen, careful not to leave any smears on the work surfaces, then glanced at the clock: ten minutes before she planned to leave. Queen Elizabeth II was opening the new Opera House down at Bennelong Point and Val hoped she could push her way to the front of the crowd to see her in the flesh, maybe even shake her hand. She’d been practicing her curtsies just in case.

Val was fascinated by the pretty English queen, just eight years her senior, and her dashing husband, Philip. In photos they looked as if they were madly in love. Val had read in a magazine that Elizabeth had had to fight to be allowed to marry him: her parents felt he was not her equal as he was just a Greek prince in exile, without much money, while she was heir to the British throne. They had been writing to each other since she was thirteen, and finally overcame parental opposition and got married when she was twenty-one, in a glitzy ceremony that was straight out of a fairy tale, with gilded coaches, frock-coated footmen, and a flowing white dress.

Val’s father had opposed her marriage to Tony, which meant they’d had to wait till after her eighteenth birthday before they slipped off to tie the knot. He said Tony wasn’t ambitious enough, and objected to the fact that his family was Catholic. “They’ll expect you to raise twenty kids,” he warned, and told her she was too young to know what she was getting into. She should have listened. She’d been so naïve back then, so desperate to escape from the gulag conditions at home with her Russian father, that she hadn’t realized the trap she was falling into.