The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  She smiled at her strange self and reached for the spectacles that completed the disguise. The labels peeping out from the luggage rack above her head confirmed her new identity: Mrs. M. Miller of Greystone House, Drewsteignton, Exeter.

  She opened the door of the compartment and stood for a moment, paralyzed at the thought of entering the dining car. All those faces. What if she was recognized?

  But her stomach came to the rescue. The smell of hot buttered toast and bacon and coffee came wafting along the corridor as a door opened somewhere. There is nothing like a good breakfast to banish the nerves, her father always used to say. Her insides rumbled in happy anticipation as she followed her nose.

  The headwaiter seated Agatha with her back to the engine and asked whether she would prefer Indian or Chinese tea. He went to fetch it while she perused the menu: eggs Benedict, kedgeree, or pancakes with maple syrup? Delicious indecision. By the time he returned with a pot of Darjeeling, she had made up her mind.

  The newspaper, carefully ironed, was laid out beside silver cutlery that glinted where the sun caught it. She unfolded it, reaching for her tea. As she lifted the monogrammed porcelain cup to her lips, she spotted a girl at the table opposite.

  No more than twenty-five, Agatha guessed. Dark wavy hair and delicate features, well-cut, unfussy clothes, and just a little makeup. The sight of her gave Agatha a strange sense of déjà vu. She felt sure she had seen her somewhere before but couldn’t place her. Thankfully, the girl was not looking up. It gave Agatha a chance to conceal herself behind the pages of the paper. But as she opened it, she saw something plop onto the piece of toast on the girl’s plate.

  She was crying.

  As Agatha watched, the tears fell in a steady stream. The girl made no sound and no attempt to wipe her face, as if she was paralyzed by grief. Agatha picked up her cup and set it down again, her fingers working furiously on the handle. Should she pretend not to notice? Would that be the correct way to behave? No, she decided, she must go to her.

  But at that moment the girl glanced up. She was not looking at Agatha but at something at the far end of the dining car. She moved her hand slightly. It was the vaguest shadow of a wave, as if she was afraid of being observed.

  It would have been rude, of course, for Agatha to twist her head round to see who she was waving at. But a strange trick of light revealed who the girl had seen. Agatha blinked as a ray of sunshine slid a reflection across the window: a face framed in the doorway of the dining car.

  His face.

  He was not a ghost; she had not dreamed him up. He was here, on the Orient Express.

  Agatha’s hand began to shake, her teacup catching the saucer. But the sound was drowned by the sudden whoosh of the brakes. The train began to slow down. Suddenly, there were wooden houses with frost-rimed windows, carts driven by people with fur hats and pale, pinched faces.

  The train came to an abrupt halt. The door at the end of the dining car swung open. She saw the back of his head as he walked away.

  Was it him? Was it really him?

  Agatha glanced at the girl. She was staring at her plate, her hair falling forward, curtaining her face.

  If that was him, then who was she?

  The carriage gave a little shudder as the engine pulled away. Agatha twisted her head to catch the name of the station, but the sign flashed past before she could make it out. She guessed that they must be in Switzerland or Italy. Why would Archie be getting off a train in either of those places?

  She turned to look at the girl, but as she did so, the waiter arrived with breakfast, blocking her view. In the time it took him to lay down the plate, unfurl her napkin, and ask if anything else was required, the girl had left the dining car.

  Could this be Archie’s mistress? It suddenly struck her how little she knew of the woman who had stolen her husband’s heart.

  Her name: yes, she knew that. She had even seen her once. He had brought her to the house for the weekend with a group of his golfing friends. But Agatha was laid up with the flu. She had heard them all in the hall as she lay in bed. She wanted to get up, at least to say hello, guilt-ridden at being such a rotten hostess.

  Probably there was nothing going on at that stage, otherwise Archie wouldn’t have had the nerve to invite her. On the Saturday morning, Agatha had left her bed to go to the bathroom and glimpsed two men and a woman in the hallway. They didn’t see her. It struck her how attractive the woman was: slim, with dark wavy hair. She had asked Archie, when they’d all gone, who she was. Oh, Nancy, he said. Not a bad handicap, for a woman: she plays off ten.

  Agatha never saw her again after that. Never even thought of her until a year later. It was the summer of 1926: the night before Rosalind’s seventh birthday. That was the night Archie chose to tell her there was someone else: someone who meant more to him than his daughter and his wife.

  So was this her? How Agatha wished she had a clearer memory of the woman in the hall at Sunningdale.

  She picked up her knife and fork and tried to do justice to the eggs Benedict, but her insides were in knots.

  When she rose to leave the dining car, she lingered by the place the girl had occupied, scanning the table for clues. A handkerchief, perhaps, with an initial? But there was only the crumpled napkin and a few crumbs of toast.

  You’re letting your imagination run away with you. Her mother’s voice this time.

  Agatha paused in the corridor, pressing her face against the cool glass of the window. Her breath blurred a landscape of meadows sprinkled with snow. This was not meant to happen. She had come on this journey to heal, to move on.

  The sight of pine trees whizzing past made her dizzy. She closed her eyes, enveloped by an awful sense of emptiness. It was as if she were back in that hotel room in Harrogate, all alone, waiting to be found. Longing for Archie to come for her, to want her back.

  It had been nearly two years since she’d boarded that train to the north of England without telling anyone where she was going: a gray December morning four months to the day of Archie’s bombshell about the new love of his life. She had begged him for more time, for an attempt at reconciliation. On that Saturday in December they were supposed to be going for a weekend away together in Yorkshire. To a hotel in Harrogate. But on the Friday night he hadn’t come home. She had waited and waited—and in the end something inside her had just snapped.

  Running away again . . .

  She heard a door open and turned abruptly away from the window, afraid of what people would think if they saw her. The train took a sharp bend, and she grabbed the handrail to steady herself. In her confused state she opened the door of the wrong compartment. Or so she thought when she saw a woman stretched out on the banquette.

  “Oh—I’m so sorry!” Agatha backed out, shaking her head.

  “Mrs. Miller?” The woman looked as if she’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue. Tall enough to have to duck beneath the luggage rack as she stood up, she was dressed in pajamas of white silk with a border of black Egyptian hieroglyphs at the neck, cuffs, and hips. As she moved toward Agatha, her clothes wafted a heady, unfamiliar scent. There was vanilla in it and something like jasmine or narcissus.

  She held out her hand with a dazzling smile, revealing perfect teeth. She appeared to be wearing no makeup other than lipstick, and her skin was flawless. Her hair was thick and glossy—a Scandinavian pale blonde—and her eyes were a deep blue, almost violet. They reminded Agatha of the harebells that used to grow in the fields beyond the garden of her mother’s house in Torquay.

  “Katharine Keeling.” Her handshake was as firm as a man’s. “I do apologize for alarming you. I had to get them to move me. Bedbugs, would you believe!” She arched her eyebrows and gave a little shudder, which made her bosom shift beneath the silk pajamas. “You wouldn’t think it, would you? Not on the Orient Express. I’m told it’s all the woodwork—they burrow into it and come out at night.” She sank down onto the banquette and patted the upholstery. “Now, come and te
ll me all about yourself.”

  As Agatha sat down, she saw that the compartment had been completely rearranged in the time it had taken her to eat breakfast. None of her things were in evidence. Her hairbrush and dressing case had been removed from the table under the window. Her nightdress no longer hung from the hook on the back of the door, and her hatbox had been turned on its side and crammed into a corner of the luggage rack.

  She had chosen a second-class cabin because there was so much more space than in the single-berth, first-class compartments. Now she wondered if she had done the right thing.

  “What a divine jacket!” Katharine ran a long, elegant finger over the fabric at Agatha’s wrist. “Is it Sonia Delaunay?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I thought so. I worked for her once.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m a commercial artist.” Katharine nodded. “I’ve worked for fashion houses in London and Paris.”

  “You must be very talented,” Agatha said. “Are you traveling for work or pleasure?”

  Katharine threw back her head and laughed. “Do they have to be mutually exclusive? I love my work more than anything.” Reaching across to the table under the window, she picked up a silver cigarette case and flipped it open. “Would you like one?”

  “No, thank you—I don’t smoke.”

  “Hope you don’t mind if I do.” She pulled something from the pocket of her pajamas. A cigarette holder, black with a silver tip.

  Agatha’s heart sank at the thought of sharing a compartment with a smoker. In the years with Archie she had got used to the smell of cigarettes. But sleeping in a room with no lingering scent of tobacco was the one pleasure of being single again.

  “They’re Turkish,” Katharine said. “Rather good. One of my colleagues brought them back from Baghdad. I must get some more.”

  “Is that where you’re going?” It seemed an odd destination for someone from the world of haute couture. Agatha had assumed the woman would be leaving the train at Milan.

  Katharine blew out a plume of smoke as she lit the cigarette. “I’m going on to Ur. I’m working on the dig there: drawing the finds. It’s my fourth season.”

  “You’re working with Leonard Woolley?” Agatha’s voice rose in awe.

  “I am.” Katharine rolled her eyes, as if the name conjured something unpleasant.

  Agatha wanted to ask what she meant by it—whether the great man was difficult to work with or had some unfortunate personal habit—but that would have sounded disrespectful. Instead, she told Katharine how fascinated she had been to read about the dig in the papers and how it had influenced her decision to travel east instead of west. Then she asked which of the many treasures was her favorite.

  Katharine tapped her cigarette over the ashtray. “I suppose it would have to be Queen Shuabi’s headdress. It took me two months to reconstruct it—an absolute nightmare with all those tiny beads—but it was worth it.”

  She described how the team at the dig unearthed burial sites that had lain undiscovered beneath the desert sand for three thousand years. The headdress of the Sumerian queen was one of many magnificent grave goods found in the inner chamber of the tomb they had excavated last season.

  Katharine’s description of the process of piecing together fragments of gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and agate drew Agatha into another world. She hardly noticed the mountain landscape beyond the window giving way to the plains of Lombardy, so transfixed was she by the images of what had been discovered at Ur.

  A sharp rap on the door of the compartment startled her back to reality. It was the steward with their morning coffee. He asked Katharine if there was anything still to be moved from the compartment she had previously occupied. He addressed her as “Mrs. Keeling,” which surprised Agatha, as Katharine wore no wedding ring.

  When he had gone, Katharine said, “You’ve been naughty, Mrs. Miller, letting me go on and on about my work: now tell me something about yourself.” She spooned sugar into her cup and lifted it to her mouth. When she replaced it in the saucer, there was a perfect arc of coral lipstick on the rim. “Baghdad is an unusual destination for a woman traveling alone . . .” She trailed off, the implication obvious. She wanted to know why Agatha was taking such a holiday without a husband.

  She took a breath before replying. She had anticipated curiosity of this kind and had a ready answer. But she wanted to make sure it sounded convincing. She told Katharine that her daughter had gone away to boarding school—which was true—and that she missed her terribly and needed a distraction. Then came the lie: “My husband . . . He’s . . . he was killed in the war.”

  She had practiced in the mirror. Told herself over and over that it was better to pretend to be a widow than admit to the shame of divorce. It felt awful, though, saying it for real, as if she were wishing he really was dead. And that face reflected in the train window, haunting her before the lie had even been told. Was that her punishment? The latest cruel trick of her senses, to see things that weren’t really there?

  Katharine reached across the seat and patted her hand. “I lost my husband, too.”

  The words made blood surge into Agatha’s face. Now she felt doubly guilty. You wicked, wicked woman, Archie hissed.

  Katharine’s eyes went to the window. “We met when I went as a nurse to France.”

  “France?” Agatha echoed. It was hardly possible to imagine an exotic creature like this in the blood and mud of a field hospital. Nursing soldiers in Torquay had been bad enough. She could only imagine the horrors Katharine must have seen.

  “We were only married for six months.” Katharine reached for another cigarette.

  “War is so cruel.” A platitude—but experience had taught Agatha not to probe too deeply.

  “When it ended, I went nursing again,” Katharine said. “I was in Egypt at first, but then I went to Baghdad. That’s how I came to work on the dig.”

  Agatha waited for her to go on, but after lighting her cigarette, Katharine fell silent. There was a weight of expectation in the air, as if, having sketched the circumstances of her marriage, Agatha must now do the same.

  Agatha sidestepped it by telling her that she, too, had lived in Egypt. They talked of the places they had seen, a decade apart. Then Agatha launched into a description of her time at the hospital, playing up the humorous moments. She told Katharine how she and her friend Eileen had taught themselves chemistry between shifts on the wards, and how they had accidentally blown up the coffee machine in the process of using it to practice Marsh’s test for arsenic.

  She didn’t tell Katharine that she had married Archie the weekend after the explosion happened, that the patients had teased her about her new status on her return, and a soldier from Glasgow had called across the ward that he preferred Nurse Christie to Nurse Miller, because it was a Scottish name.

  It had been so strange, going back to work as a married woman after just one night with Archie, not knowing when or even if she would see him again. He had proposed just days after they met, sweeping her off her feet at a Christmas ball. Tall and slim with wavy golden hair, he had a careless confidence about him that captivated her. And he was a fabulous dancer. They had had a waltz and a foxtrot together, and he asked her for another dance, but her card was full. With a wave of his hand, he had told her to cut the other partners.

  It had been the same when he had proposed and she had told him she was already engaged to a gunner, Reggie Lucy, who was away with his regiment. What on earth does that matter? He’d brushed it away as if it were no more than a stray hair on his collar. I’m not engaged to anyone else, but if I was, I’d break it off in a minute without even thinking about it.

  And so she had written to Reggie—kind, gentle, patient Reggie, who had insisted on waiting at least two years to walk up the aisle—to tell him she was going to marry someone else. She had been so contented, so peaceful, with Reggie. He was a safe foot on the shore—a good companion, not a grand passion. But now she was s
wimming out into deep water. She had fallen in love with a stranger, a man who fascinated her because he was her polar opposite: practical where she was romantic, logical where she let her imagination run away with her, and hard-boiled where she was sentimental. And she had ached to marry him. It was unbearable when her mother had told them they must wait until he was earning enough to support her.

  “You’ll hate Baghdad, you know,” Katharine said suddenly.

  Agatha turned to her, bewildered. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s full of memsahibs. You might as well be in Surrey. It’s all tea parties and tennis clubs. You must avoid them if you want to see the real Mesopotamia.”

  “Oh . . . I . . . er . . . I’ve booked a room for five nights at the Tigris Palace Hotel, but I have no real plans beyond that.” Agatha stopped short of saying that she was hoping to visit the dig at Ur. She didn’t want to appear to be inviting herself to stay with someone she had only just met.

  After an awkward silence, Katharine said, “Well, you must come to us.”

  Agatha wondered whom she meant by “us.”

  “There’s an annex to the dig house for guests,” Katharine went on. “Leonard’s not very keen on tourists, but he won’t mind me showing you around.”

  Agatha thought Katharine’s use of her employer’s Christian name rather too familiar. It implied a lack of respect for someone who was a world-renowned figure. She wondered if this was something peculiar to the life of an archaeological dig—that in such a closed world different rules applied.

  “You’re very kind,” she said, “but I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you at your workplace. The man at Cook’s said I could hire a local guide to take me to places of interest.”