The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  “Never?”

  He shook his head. “Barring handshakes and the odd tackle on the rugby field at school, I’ve never known what it feels like to touch another human being.”

  She blinked, uncomprehending. “That can’t be true, surely? When you were a child . . . ?”

  “My mother died when I was two years old, so I can’t remember what it was like to have her arms around me.” His voice was matter-of-fact. There was no hint of self-pity. “And my father was a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He never showed emotion unless he was giving a sermon. He thought little boys should be toughened up, so he packed me off to boarding school at the age of five.” He took her other hand, looking into her eyes. “So you see, Katharine, if I come across as a cold fish, it’s because I’ve never had the chance to be physically close to anyone. Until now.”

  “What are you saying, Len?” She searched his face.

  His lips parted, then closed again, as if he was afraid to express what was in his mind. After a long moment, he said: “I just want to feel . . . loved. Could you do that? Is it too much to ask?”

  CHAPTER 27

  One week later

  Agatha had baby James against her shoulder. She was patting his back to burp him. Nancy was in bed, her eyes closed. As Agatha tiptoed across the room, she heard footsteps in the corridor. Katharine’s face appeared round the door.

  “Are you all right?” she mouthed.

  Agatha pointed to the drawer that served as a cot, jerking her thumb toward the door. Katharine cottoned on straight away. She crept into the room and lifted the drawer, tucking it under her arm. Agatha followed her out of Nancy’s room, back to her own bedroom.

  “Would you like to hold him before I put him down? He’s nearly asleep, I think.”

  “I wouldn’t want to disturb him. He looks so peaceful,” Katharine replied.

  Agatha nodded. She doubted that James would have minded being held by another pair of arms. He was still too young to know the difference between his mother and anybody else. But over the past few days, she had noticed how reticent Katharine was to handle him. She would do anything to help as long as it didn’t involve any physical contact. There was ambivalence there, as if, having saved his life, she was afraid of what she had brought into the world.

  Agatha sensed that she didn’t want to talk about it, nor about the state of affairs with Leonard. Since the day James was born, she had undergone a subtle but noticeable change: she was quieter, less bossy, and . . . Agatha struggled to think of the right word to describe the difference in her friend. Gentler. That was it. Agatha no longer walked into the room wondering if she was going to give her the third degree.

  “I’ll leave you to it now, shall I?” Katharine set the drawer down on the rug. “I expect you’ll want a nap, too, once he goes off?”

  Agatha nodded. “Will you ask Saleem to get some milk ready in case he wakes up? I don’t want to disturb Nancy until suppertime.”

  When she’d gone, Agatha laid James on the bed. Then she knelt on the floor, between him and the rug. Placing one hand under his head and the other round his body, she eased him off the bed and into the makeshift cot. She tucked in his blanket, anxious not to wake him. The slightest whimper, she knew, would bring Nancy hobbling down the corridor to fetch him.

  She was worried about Nancy. She wasn’t eating much, and she had developed an unhealthy pallor. She was trying her best to feed James, but every time it was a struggle. More than once Agatha had found her in tears, worn out with it. So they had been supplementing his diet with goat’s milk. It was a painstaking process, with no bottle. You had to twist the end of a piece of muslin into a point, dip it in the bowl, then try to get it into James’s mouth.

  The doctor was due to make another visit tomorrow. The last time he had come, he had pronounced her absolutely fine. He had congratulated Agatha on the delivery, saying that Nancy couldn’t be in better shape if her baby had been born in a hospital. But Agatha wasn’t so sure. Each night, as she was falling asleep, she went over and over it in her mind, reliving each traumatic moment. It had all happened so quickly. She hadn’t even been able to wash her hands before assisting Nancy. She had gone to her aid within minutes of coming out of the river—with goodness knows what potentially dangerous bacteria clinging to her skin. And then, when Katharine had saved James’s life and he was lying on the blanket, yelling for all he was worth, they’d had to cut the cord. To do this, Agatha had sent Katharine to retrieve her shoes from under the tree. She had removed the shoelaces, tying one close to James’s tummy and the other a couple of inches along the cord. Then she had cut it with the knife Katharine had used to peel the oranges for their picnic.

  She ran the images through her head for the umpteenth time, thinking of how different things would have been if she hadn’t brought Nancy to Ur, if she had stayed in Baghdad instead and got her to a hospital when she went into labor. And something else was preying on her mind. James was not a premature baby—she was certain of that. He might have been born a couple of weeks early—but no more. Which meant he must have been conceived at the end of April: the time Nancy was on her honeymoon. She had been so adamant that the baby was not her husband’s—but could she really be so certain?

  She closed her eyes. No point in worrying about that now. The most important thing was to get Nancy back on an even keel, get her back to Baghdad, and into some kind of normality.

  Thinking about that, Agatha drifted off. She slipped into a dream where she was swimming—not in the river Euphrates but in the lake with Max. He was laughing and holding little James above the water, dipping his feet in, then throwing him into the air and catching him. But when Agatha swam up to them, she saw that the baby wasn’t James: he had Max’s face and her blonde hair . . .

  “Agatha! Agatha!”

  She woke to the sound of Max’s voice, an urgent whisper on the other side of the door. She scrambled off the bed, careful to avoid the drawer where James lay, still fast asleep.

  “What is it?” She opened the door, rubbing her eyes.

  “Can I come in for a minute? I won’t wake him, I promise.”

  They sat down on the bed together. She could see from the look on his face that this was not a social visit.

  “It’s about Nancy,” he began. “I had a wire from a friend in Baghdad. Her husband’s turned up there. He’s on his way here now, apparently.”

  “What?” Agatha gasped. “But . . . how did he know?”

  “Hugh Carrington must have told him,” Max said with a shrug. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. It never occurred to me when I was telling him about it that he’d be straight on the phone to Felix Nelson.”

  Remembered words surged from some dark chamber of her mind with the force of a torpedo. They were Nancy’s words—a fragment of the story of her doomed honeymoon in Venice: 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.

  Oh my God, Agatha thought, he’s coming to take James.

  “We’ve got to get them away from here.” Katharine couldn’t keep still. She was standing over Agatha as James sucked milk from the muslin rag. She reached out, her hand stopping a fraction away from the soft black down on his head, as if she was itching to touch him, to protect him.

  “But how can we?” Agatha moved the bowl of milk so that Katharine wouldn’t knock it over with her elbow. “Nancy’s still very weak; I don’t think she’s well enough to go anywhere just yet.”

  “She’s certainly not well enough for a train journey—I wasn’t thinking of that—but there’s somewhere else she could go.”

  “Where?”

  “The Bedouin village. It’s less than five miles away. They’d hide her for us.”

  Agatha’s hand stopped midway between the bowl and James’s mouth. “Are you serious? Leaving a tiny baby and a woman who’s just given birth in a tent in the middle of the desert . . .”

  “We wouldn’t b
e leaving them. They’d be well looked after. The Bedouin women have been looking after babies in those conditions for thousands of years. They’re far more experienced than we are.”

  Agatha glanced at the scrap of muslin dripping milk, most of which had missed James’s mouth. “I suppose you’re right. We’d have to ask them first, though, wouldn’t we?”

  “No time,” Katharine said, shaking her head. “There’s only one train coming in from Baghdad today, and if Max’s friend is right, Felix Nelson will be on it. That gives us just under two hours to get Nancy and James out of here.”

  Max was asleep when Agatha knocked on his door. He opened it rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking up like a chimney sweep’s brush.

  “Didn’t mean to doze off,” he mumbled. Then, seeing her face, he said: “How did Nancy take the news?”

  “Not well. She’s terrified of him. Says he’s not the sort of person you’d want to get on the wrong side of. We need to get her and the baby out of his way.” She rattled off Katharine’s plan. “Could you drive us? Katharine’s going to stay here and deal with him when he arrives.”

  Max looked perplexed. “But James is his son. Surely he has a right to see him—even if they’re no longer living as man and wife.”

  “But he’s . . .” She’d promised not to tell. But this was an emergency. If Max was going to help them, he needed to know the truth. “James isn’t his son.” Even as she said it, she wondered if it was true. But Nancy was in no fit state to be interrogated about it. And a confrontation with Felix could just about finish her off. What mattered most was to get her to a safe place. Somewhere she could recover in peace until she was ready to face the world.

  “Not his son?” Max echoed.

  Agatha took a deep breath. “I couldn’t tell you before . . . I promised Nancy I wouldn’t. I know it sounds awful, but there are”—she fumbled for the right words—“extenuating circumstances. I haven’t got time to explain it all now. What Nancy’s afraid of is that Felix will take James from her.”

  “Why would he do that if he’s not the father?”

  “Because he needs a child born in wedlock in order to inherit the earldom. And in law he is the father: he’s still married to Nancy.”

  Max looked even more bewildered. “So . . . who’s the real father?”

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Does he know about the baby?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good grief! What a mess.”

  “You’re right: it is a mess—but we have to help them, Max.” Her eyes searched his. “We can’t let Felix take James.”

  He stood there for what seemed like an eternity. She could almost hear the scales tipping this way and that inside his head. He had principles, faith in God. Nancy had committed adultery. But her baby was an innocent victim and surely she was more sinned against than sinner?

  “I’ll get the truck ready,” he said at last. “I’m not doing this for her, though: I’m doing it for James. Because he needs his mother. And when it’s over, I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “That you’ll talk to Nancy. Get her to write to the father and tell him the truth.”

  “I can’t make her do it, Max,” she said softly. “But I promise to try.”

  CHAPTER 28

  A warm wind tugged at Agatha’s hair as she followed Max outside. He was carrying the drawer that held James, who was fast asleep, oblivious to the drama unfolding around him. She and Katharine were supporting Nancy, who hadn’t walked farther than the bathroom since giving birth.

  “Oh!” Nancy brought her hand up to her eyes. “It’s so bright!”

  Agatha looked up at the sky. It wasn’t really bright. Not today. There were big purple clouds bubbling up on the horizon, giving the sunlight a strange grayish tinge. But to Nancy, who had been cooped up inside for a week, it must have seemed dazzling.

  “We’ll put you in the middle, Nancy, I think,” Katharine said, opening the passenger door of the truck. “You can hold on to the armrest if you feel unsteady. I think Agatha had better have James on her lap. We can’t have him rolling around in that drawer.”

  “We’d better be quick.” Max glanced at his watch. “The train’s due in ten minutes.”

  When they were all settled, he turned the key in the ignition. The engine made a slow, whining noise, like an animal in pain. Max tried again. This time there was no sound at all. He jumped out and pulled something from underneath the front of the truck.

  “What’s he doing?” Nancy’s face was etched with worry.

  “He’s just cranking the engine,” Agatha said. “It’s all right. I often have to do it to my car. We’ll be off in a minute.” She leaned out of the window, calling to Max. “Do you want me to rev her up?”

  “Could you?” Max called back.

  Agatha passed James to Nancy to hold while she got out of the truck.

  Katharine saw what was happening as she came running out of the house with a basket of food. “Do you know what to do?” The look on her face mirrored Nancy’s. “Oh yes, of course: you have a car . . .”

  Agatha waited for the whir of the starting motor. As she heard the splutter of the engine, she pressed down hard on the accelerator pedal. The truck gave a heave as the engine burst into life.

  Nancy clutched Agatha’s arm. Feeling the sudden movement, James let out a whimper.

  “Don’t cry, sweetheart—we’ll be on the way now.” Agatha reached across to stroke James’s cheek. With a puzzled frown, he closed his eyes.

  “Well done!” Max gave her a big smile as she jumped down from the truck. “Thank goodness we’ve got someone who knows what they’re doing!” He glanced up at the sky. “I don’t like the look of this weather. I think there’s a sandstorm brewing. Let’s hope we make it to the village before it comes.”

  Katharine went into the Antiquities Room and set to work on a sand-encrusted Sumerian knife while she waited for Felix Nelson to arrive. It was painstaking work, performed with a delicate brush of badger hair, but it took her mind off what was about to happen.

  She was the only member of the team left at the expedition house. Max had had to take the others to the dig site before returning to Sahra’ Alqamar to make the mercy dash across the desert to the Bedouin village.

  Katharine hadn’t told Leonard about the imminent arrival of Felix Nelson. She could just imagine his reaction if she tried to explain the true nature of Nancy’s predicament. Better to wait until after the fact, she decided. Once Nancy and James were out of harm’s way, there would be time to try to make him understand.

  She hoped it wouldn’t demolish the fragile equilibrium of the past few days. Leonard had opened up like a flower. He was smiling at people—not just her—and chatting away at mealtimes. It was as if their confrontation had lifted a great dark cloud from the expedition house. To her amazement, he had readily accepted the presence of Nancy’s baby—something that would surely have sent the old Leonard into a blind rage. But if he had known that James was illegitimate, that Nancy had been having an affair with a married man, his attitude would undoubtedly have been very different. For all the progress they had made, he was still very much a preacher’s son. Those values ran through him like the grain in a plank of wood. They were never going to change.

  “Khatun!”

  A distant shout from Saleem jolted her back into the present. He was in the kitchen. He must have spotted Nancy’s husband at the gates of the compound. She picked up the badger-hair brush and worked it furiously into the crevices of the bone handle of the knife. She would pretend she hadn’t heard. Play for time.

  “Khatun!”

  Saleem was outside the door now. She replaced the knife on the shelf and smoothed down her skirt. Then she took a deep breath. Nancy’s whole future depended on her ability to present a calm, unruffled front, to lie well enough to throw Felix Nelson off the scent.

  She waited in the living room while Saleem went o
utside to tell the guards to let him in. When he introduced himself, she pretended to be surprised.

  “Viscount Nelson? What an unexpected pleasure!” She held out her hand and flashed the smile that she had perfected in the mirror as a girl of sixteen—a smile that sent most men weak at the knees.

  “Mrs. Woolley.”

  The photograph in Tatler had not done him justice. He had film-star looks, tall and slim with light-brown hair that flopped over his forehead. A well-trimmed pencil mustache outlined a petulant upper lip. He didn’t return her smile.

  “Would you like some coffee? It’s thirsty work traveling in these parts.” She tried another smile—the sympathetic one this time.

  “Thank you, no.” The mustache twitched as he glanced around the room. “I believe my wife is staying here as your guest. I’ve come to take her home.”

  “Nancy, yes. We’ve so enjoyed having her here. We met on the Orient Express—did she tell you?” If she could just stall him until Max got back . . . She did a quick calculation in her head. The train to Ur Junction went on as far as Basra, then turned round, returning a couple of hours later. If she could persuade him he’d come on a wild goose chase, they could get him back on that train, and then fetch Nancy out of hiding.

  “I’m afraid she’s put you to a lot of trouble.” Felix gave her a penetrating look. “I . . . We . . . weren’t expecting the baby to arrive when it did.”

  “Well, yes, that was rather a surprise—but a wonderful one. Mrs. Christie and I helped with the delivery. Luckily, we’d both been nurses during the war—not that I had the opportunity to learn much about midwifery in a field hospital in France, but—”

  “Is he all right?” Felix cut her short. “The baby?”

  “Yes. He’s absolutely fine. Nancy was a little weak after the birth but—”

  “Where is he?”