The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  Darling,

  Thank you for your last letter and the lovely brooch. It arrived safely at the post office here, and I’m afraid I made a fool of myself by opening it there and then and bursting into tears when I saw what was inside. I wish I could send you something. I often see things that I think you would like, but I know that any kind of present would probably stir up trouble.

  As you can see, I’ve managed to find work as a shorthand typist. It’s only temporary at the moment but hopefully will turn into a permanent job by the end of the year.

  I miss you terribly and I long to have you in my arms again. I realize, however, how difficult things must be for you at home. You say that your marriage is dead, but I feel dreadful when I think of your wife and how she would cope if you were to leave her. At the same time, I can’t help the way I feel about you. I know that I’m being selfish when I . . .

  Nancy stopped typing. She had caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. Over by the window. She turned her head and froze. A snake. The color of sand, with emerald eyes and a pair of scaly spikes on the top of its head. She had been warned about this kind of snake by the staff at the Tigris Palace. Looks like a devil, miss. A horned viper. Absolutely deadly. Its body was as thick as her wrist. And it was slithering across the floor toward the desk.

  Somehow, she managed to jump up and kick the chair sideways at the same time. It landed near the snake’s head, making it rear backward, away from her legs. And then she ran, slamming the door behind her, out into the hall, through the back door and onto the veranda, where she almost collided with Agatha, just back from her boat trip down the river.

  “Goodness! You’re as white as a sheet! Whatever’s the matter?”

  When Nancy told her about the snake, Agatha called to the Arab boatman whose gufa was still moored at the bottom of the steps. He came to their rescue with a rifle. Less than a minute after he had entered the house, a shot rang out. He emerged with the snake draped round his neck like a scarf.

  “The size of it!” Agatha blew out a breath. “You had a very lucky escape. Now, I think we both need a strong cup of tea—will you make it while I go and get an extra big tip for our friend?”

  It wasn’t until Nancy was pouring hot water into the teapot that she realized what she had done. The money was in the office—Agatha kept it in a locked drawer—and the letter was still in the typewriter. If Agatha saw it . . .

  She dashed out of the kitchen into the hall. Too late. Through the open door of the office she heard the paper rip as Agatha pulled it from the rollers.

  CHAPTER 17

  Agatha was so angry she could barely look at Nancy. Marching past her in stony silence, she went to pay the boatman. When she climbed back up the steps, Nancy was pacing the veranda, white-faced.

  “I . . . I owe you an explanation,” Nancy faltered. “I know what it must look like—but if you would just hear me out . . .”

  “What it looks like is that you’ve taken me for a fool.” Agatha sank down onto a wicker chair, her eyes following the gufa as it glided away. “I’ve housed you, fed you, bent over backwards to help you—all for a pack of lies! And to add insult to injury, you’ve been using my typewriter to write love letters to a married man!”

  “I didn’t mean to deceive you—honestly, I didn’t.” Nancy’s voice rose higher, on the verge of breaking. “That night on the train I was at my wits’ end—and you were so kind, so understanding. Don’t you see? I couldn’t tell you the whole story—not after what you’d told me about your husband.”

  “So you pretended to be a sad little wife running away from a brute of a husband—when what you actually are is . . . an adulteress.” Agatha spat the word out like a fish bone. In the silence that followed, the only sounds were the cries of wading birds picking about in the mud on the far bank of the river.

  Nancy was holding on to the rail of the veranda, looking down into the water. “I’m not proud of what I’ve done, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She turned to face Agatha. “But there’s a reason why it happened: please, let me explain.”

  Agatha met Nancy’s eyes with a cold glare. “Listen to me, young lady: you might have fooled me once, but don’t you dare try telling any more lies.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kick you out this minute.”

  “The reason I fell in love with . . . with someone else . . . is this”—Nancy swallowed, blinking back tears—“my husband brought his mistress on our honeymoon. I found them in bed together.”

  “What?”

  “The man I was writing to . . .” Nancy glanced at the torn letter on the table. “He was there, at the villa in Venice, and he . . .” She turned away. A tear trickled down her cheek.

  Agatha was on her feet in an instant. “I’m going to get that pot of tea,” she said. “And then you’re going to tell me the whole story.”

  Nancy regained some of her color as the tea went down. She spoke haltingly about the whirlwind romance with Felix, the wedding in Westminster Abbey, and her excitement at the prospect of a honeymoon in Venice.

  “He told me he was renting a villa near the Lido,” she went on. “There would be other people there—friends of his—but that would make it even more fun, he said. There would be cocktail parties and picnics on the beach, dancing, and boat trips. He made it sound so alluring. I had no idea who any of these people were because I hadn’t known him very long.” Nancy stared into her cup. “There was a woman there—a married woman—who was very attractive. She and Felix seemed very friendly, but I never thought anything of it because her husband was there, too. And then, when I was lying awake on the second night wondering why he hadn’t come to me, I decided to go to his room. And I opened the door to find him . . .” Her hand shook as she put her cup back on the saucer.

  Agatha was watching Nancy intently. Clearly, the memory of what she was describing was still raw. There was no way she was making this up.

  “I . . . I just ran out of the house,” Nancy mumbled. “I didn’t know what to do, where to go. And one of the men from the house party was sitting outside, on his own, smoking a cigarette. He could see that I was crying, and he sat me down and just listened as it all came pouring out. Then he fetched a bottle of brandy. We must have stayed there for hours because I remember how the stars moved across the sky and the moon sank into the sea. The next morning he came knocking on my door with coffee and some peaches he’d picked from the garden. He told me about the film he’d come out to Venice to work on, made me laugh with stories of the other actors and the goings-on behind the scenes. Then, next morning, we met for a swim.” She raised her cup to her lips again. “I was so unhappy, so desperate for a friend . . . I had no idea he was married. He didn’t tell me until the last day of the holiday. And by that time it was too late.”

  Agatha waited for a moment, seeing it all in her mind’s eye. “And your husband—did he know?”

  “I don’t think so. We were very discreet. Felix and I had a showdown, of course, over his mistress. I wanted to know why he had been so keen to marry me when all the while he was in love with someone else. After all, I wasn’t exactly a catch: my father’s estate was on its knees.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, he gave it to me straight—said he’d had to marry in order to inherit and thought I would do as well as any of the five other girls he’d already proposed to at the party where we met.”

  Agatha let out a sharp breath. “And what was he expecting you to do when you found out about the other woman? Just go along with it?”

  Nancy nodded. “He said that once I’d produced a child, my job would be over. It wouldn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl—as long as there was a baby. That was another condition of his inheriting the earldom, apparently—I think perhaps his father feared he might never marry. Once I’d done my duty, he said, I could take a lover of my own, if I wanted, and we’d lead separate lives under the same roof.”

  �
��What a dreadful situation.” Agatha shook her head. “I suppose you were in love with him, though, at the beginning?”

  “I was. He swept me off my feet that first night, when he proposed. I think he was probably very drunk, but I didn’t realize it. I’d been leading a very quiet life in the country with my father. I was too busy trying to keep things going on the estate to be part of the London crowd. It was the first party I’d been to in ages—and when Felix proposed, I suddenly saw that this was the answer to all our problems. My father wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.” Her eyes were brimming again, but she swallowed back the tears. “He was so delighted about the wedding. But he died two weeks after I came back from Venice.”

  “Oh, Nancy.” Agatha leaned across the space between them, taking her hand and squeezing it. “No wonder you were in such a state on the train. Where is he now—your . . . friend?”

  “Back in London. With his wife and daughter.” Agatha flinched. A wife and daughter. This was so horribly familiar. Her mind flipped back to the December night two years ago, when she had sat in her car outside the cottage in Godalming that belonged to Archie’s friends, the Jameses, watching shadows on the curtains, knowing that he was inside with . . . She looked up suddenly. “Who is he, this man you were writing to? What’s his name?”

  It had suddenly fallen into place—like the missing piece of a jigsaw. She had seen him. On the train. Spotted him on the platform in Paris, then again, the next morning. That reflection in the glass was the face of Nancy’s lover: she must have been waving good-bye to him as tears streamed down her face . . . waving good-bye to a man with an uncanny resemblance to Archie. But not Archie; it couldn’t be. She had said he was an actor. In films.

  “I . . . I can’t tell you.” Nancy dropped her head. “He made me promise not to tell a living soul. He’s worried that if it got into the papers . . . Not that I’m suggesting you’d ever do anything like that, of course . . .” She gripped Agatha’s hand as if it were a lifeline.

  “I think there’s something else you need to tell me though, isn’t there?” Agatha paused. This was a shot in the dark. “You’re expecting a baby, aren’t you?”

  Nancy closed her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Is it his or your husband’s?”

  “His.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.” She opened her eyes, blinking as the sun caught them. “Felix and I . . . after those first few days of the honeymoon, I couldn’t bear to have him anywhere near me. To keep him away, I told him I’d fallen pregnant the very first night we’d made love. I’m ashamed to say I let him go on thinking that until I left him. I wrote a letter for him to find after I’d gone, telling him it was a pack of lies.”

  “Is that what made you decide to run away? Finding out that you were expecting the other man’s child?”

  “Yes. I didn’t have much of a plan. I just needed to escape. Felix is not the kind of man you’d want to get on the wrong side of. He can be very frightening when he’s angry.”

  “And the . . . other man. Does he know?”

  Nancy gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of her head. “I wanted him to leave his wife—I admit that—but I couldn’t resort to emotional blackmail.”

  Agatha fell silent then. How could she give an opinion, or any advice? How could she be impartial? She had a sudden, vivid image of the wife of Nancy’s lover going about her daily routine in a house somewhere in London. In her mind’s eye it was a place like the one she and Archie had lived in as newlyweds. This woman would be looking after her home and her child, spending the evenings with her husband, having no idea that he was in love with someone else. Not just in love, but soon to be the father of another woman’s baby. What a nightmare.

  She thought about how she had pleaded with Archie to stay when he told her about his affair. How she had begged him to give their marriage another chance, to stay for three more months before making a decision. She remembered how awful that had been, how cold he was toward her and the rows they had had. Things had become so bad that if she entered a room, he would get up and leave.

  Eventually, she saw that by trying to cling to him, all she had done was prolong the agony. There were no half measures with Archie. I can’t stand not having what I want, and I can’t stand not being happy. Everybody can’t be happy—somebody has got to be unhappy. He’d said it time and again during those three months. And as the weeks went by, she felt his hatred, his sense of being trapped, and it scared her. She feared he wanted her dead.

  It was unnerving, seeing an almost identical scenario through Nancy’s eyes. She ought to despise her for what she was trying to do, but deep down that wasn’t what she felt. Why not? Perhaps it was because she had glimpsed something she had never accepted up to now: that living with a husband who doesn’t love you is far worse than living alone.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what I’ll do—when the baby’s born.” Nancy’s voice cut across her thoughts. “If I find a job, I’ll be able to rent an apartment and hire a nanny.”

  “How far along are you?” Agatha glanced at the voluminous aba Nancy had made for herself. It really was impossible to tell what shape her body was under that.

  Nancy’s hand went to her stomach. “I’m not completely sure. About six months, I think.”

  “Six!” Agatha gasped. “You can’t possibly go looking for a job at six months’ pregnant. We’re going to have to think of something else.”

  Nancy looked up. “We?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to leave you to face this on your own, do you? Listen, if the worst comes to the worst, you’ll have to come back on the train with me: come and stay at my house in London—at least until the baby’s born.”

  Nancy shook her head. “That’s awfully kind of you—but I couldn’t possibly. You’ve been so good to me already. And besides, Felix would play merry hell if he found out. I’d be afraid of what he might do. I think I’d rather take my chances in Baghdad.”

  “Do you think your baby’s father will leave his wife, eventually? Come and join you out here?”

  Nancy looked past Agatha, her eyes following a solitary pelican skimming the water. “I wish I knew,” she murmured.

  CHAPTER 18

  Baghdad to Ur—Five days later

  “Are you sure you want to come?” Agatha was in the kitchen, wrapping hard-boiled eggs in a cloth. She put them in a basket alongside a pile of flatbreads and a jar of damson jam.

  “Yes, I do.” Nancy added four peaches in twists of brown paper to the basket. “I don’t think I could have faced it when we first arrived, but it’s much cooler now. I don’t think it’ll be too bad on the train.”

  “I hope not,” Agatha replied. “It’s a long way. But hopefully we’ll be asleep for part of it.”

  “Have you packed the bug powder that Max gave us?”

  “In here.” Agatha patted her jacket pocket.

  They traveled to the railway station in a cart drawn by mules. On the way they stopped at the coppersmiths’ souk, where Agatha climbed down and spent a few minutes haggling with one of the stallholders. She returned to the cart followed by a young Arab boy carrying a large wooden box.

  “I’m getting better at this,” she said, smiling as it was loaded on top of their suitcases. “I hope Katharine will like it.” She turned in her seat, lifting the lid of the box to reveal a coffee set nestled in straw. The pot had a swan neck and an intricate pattern of silver wire inlaid in the copper. The same pattern was repeated on the cups and saucers.

  “She’ll love it,” Nancy replied. “It’ll be nice for her to have something elegant. From what she said in her letters, life at the dig is pretty basic.”

  “It does seem strange to think of her in that environment.” Agatha settled back as the mules set off again. “She’s the last person you’d imagine wanting to spend their time bent over a burial pit in the burning sun.”

  “And very different from what she d
id before. I wonder how she came to it.”

  “I think she came out here as a nurse at first. That’s what she told me on the train. She said that after her husband died, she stayed out in the Middle East, and nursing was how she made her living. I think she must have started drawing some of the finds at the dig—and when they saw how talented she was, they offered her a job.”

  “She’s got guts, hasn’t she?” Nancy said. “After what happened in Egypt, most people would have turned tail and run home.”

  Agatha nodded. “I think she found it easier to be away from England, though. She must have realized that the papers would get hold of it. It’s unbearable, knowing that the world and his wife are devouring every detail of your private life with their toast and marmalade.”

  “I don’t know how you got through all that. It must have been sheer hell.” Nancy clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “The press would have an absolute field day with my life, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, let’s just hope they never get wind of it. I think you’re pretty safe out here.” The cart drew to a halt outside the station, and the driver jumped off to unload their bags. Ten minutes later they were on the train, which had comfortable Pullman-style carriages not unlike those of the Orient Express.

  “It’s much better than I was expecting,” Nancy said as they stowed their luggage. “I can’t believe there would be fleas.”

  “We’d better do the seats, just in case.” Agatha opened the tin of powder and began sprinkling it over the plush upholstery. “Ugh! It smells awful!”

  “Shall I let in some fresh air?” With some difficulty, Nancy pulled the window open a couple of inches. As she sat down, the train began to move.