The Woman on the Orient Express

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  “Is Leonard coming?” Katharine raised her hand to the brim of her hat, peering upward.

  “He’s on his way,” Max replied. “He just wants to make sure the statue’s properly wrapped before he lets it out of his sight. He said he’d meet us by the baker’s.”

  “The baker’s?” Agatha echoed. “Surely there can’t be?”

  “Not these days.” Max smiled. “But there was, three thousand years ago. It’s down there.” He pointed to an area of low ruined walls punctuated by round stumps. “That’s where the shops and houses were in the time of Nebuchadnezzar.”

  “As in the Bible?” Nancy asked.

  Max nodded. “This place is straight out of the Old Testament: Ur of the Chaldeans is mentioned in the book of Genesis. We think Abraham lived here before migrating to Palestine. That’s part of what we’re doing—looking for physical proof of things written about in the Bible.”

  “Would you take them down there, Max?” Katharine tilted her head, a rather imperious look on her face. It reminded Agatha that by virtue of her marriage, Katharine had gone from being Max’s equal to his de facto superior.

  “Of course.” If Max found this change in her status difficult, he didn’t show it.

  “I’ll see you all back at the house for lunch.” Katharine went back over to where Hamoudi was waiting.

  “This way, ladies.” Max led them to a different path from the one they’d come up by. When they were out of earshot of Katharine, he said: “You’re in for a treat. Leonard Woolley’s quite a showman. He’s literally rewriting the history books, and he loves telling visitors what we’ve found here.”

  While they waited for the great man to arrive, they wandered around the ruined buildings. Max explained that when the city was built, the river Euphrates ran much closer, its course having deviated by ten miles in the past three millennia. “It was a great trading city,” he said. “We know from the stone tablets that there were goldsmiths and jewelers as well as butchers and bakers. Ships came in from the Persian Gulf, bringing emeralds from Egypt, sapphires from Kashmir, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan . . .” He stopped by a flight of steps that led down to a mud-brick floor. “I’ll never forget the day we unearthed the first of the royal tombs: there were seventy-four bodies—all buried alive at the bottom of a deep shaft—but when we exposed it, we thought at first that what we were looking at was a golden carpet. It turned out to be the headdresses of the ladies of the court—made from gold beech leaves—and the gold harps and lyres on which they’d played the funeral dirge to the end.”

  “It’s almost impossible to imagine, isn’t it?” Agatha said. “To be sacrificed like that.”

  “It reminds me of the Titanic.” Nancy nodded. “The band playing on, knowing they were going to drown.”

  “Who’s been talking about drowning?” A voice boomed out behind them. “I hope this young man hasn’t been stealing my thunder!”

  Leonard Woolley’s mouth curved up at the edges in what was probably his version of a smile, but his eyes had an intensity that made Agatha feel like a naughty child about to be admonished by the headmaster.

  His handshake was firm and brief. “Follow me now,” he said. “And Max, you bring up the rear: we don’t want any accidents.”

  He took them past the ruined buildings to a vast pit whose sides were striped with the sedimentary deposits of thousands of years. “It’s sixty feet deep.” He stood at the edge, one hand outstretched. “There are steps built into the walls. When we reach the bottom, we get beyond recorded history.” He moved forward, beckoning the others to follow, and disappeared over the edge.

  Agatha cast a worried glance at Nancy. “What do you think? It’s very steep.”

  “You go,” Nancy said. “I’ll wait over there.” She pointed to a low wall of mud bricks, which was just the right height to sit on.

  “Are you feeling unwell?” Max was by her side in an instant. “I have some water if that would help.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, smiling. “I’m just a little tired after the journey. I’ll be fine—really. You take Agatha down.”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” He turned to Agatha, offering her his hand as she stepped over the side of the pit.

  They walked in single file down the steps, gradually descending into semidarkness. When they caught up with Leonard, he appeared not to notice. He was staring intently at something halfway down the side of one of the walls. “Do you see the layer of reddish sand over there?” He spoke without shifting his gaze.

  Agatha peered down into the pit, her eyes gradually adjusting to the gloom. “Yes,” she said, “I see it.”

  “That’s the period when writing was invented.” He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had a different intonation, as if he was delivering a well-rehearsed lecture. “Here in the southern valley of the Euphrates, between 3500 and 3200 BC, ancient scribes devised a system of making wedge-shaped, triangular marks in clay—the cuneiform script which eventually led to the first alphabet.”

  That’s more than five thousand years ago, Agatha thought. She scanned the layers of earth between this one and the top of the pit, trying to work out how many generations had come and gone in that time. She wondered if there had been some distant ancestor of hers, writing stories on tablets of clay.

  “Now,” Leonard said, “look further down and you’ll see a broad brown layer of alluvial clay.”

  Agatha looked where he was pointing.

  “That kind of clay could only have been deposited by floodwater,” he went on. “It dates back to the time of the book of Genesis. We found prehistoric graves in that layer—the remains of people drowned in the Great Flood.”

  “Really?” Agatha gazed in awe at the thin line of brown earth sandwiched between two dirty yellow layers. “I didn’t realize Noah was from Mesopotamia.”

  Leonard nodded. “His story is recorded in the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh—the earliest-surviving written record in the world. He has a different name, of course—he’s Utnapishtim in the Sumerian language—but many of the details of the story, such as the sending out of birds from the ark, are sufficiently close to what’s written in the Bible to prove that it happened here.” He forked the air with his hands, looking to the top of the pit as he did so, as if seeking approval from on high.

  “Of course, what you see at ground level now came thousands of years after the flood,” he went on. “Most people don’t realize that the period of time between Noah and Nebuchadnezzar is just as long as the one that separates us from Nebuchadnezzar.” He pointed to the bottom of the pit. “Come and stand on the last step.”

  As they made their way deeper into the pit, Agatha caught her foot on a loose stone. She felt herself slip sideways and flailed out for the wall, disorientated by the lack of light. She felt a hand on her shoulder, steadying her from behind.

  “Careful—it gets a bit tricky down here.”

  She felt Max’s breath, warm on the back of her neck.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  When they reached the last step, Leonard stood in silence for a moment. It felt rather like standing in church, waiting for the service to begin. “You’ve just walked through ten thousand years of human existence,” he said at last. “What we’re standing on now is virgin soil. And in the layer above it, we found fragments of the reed huts built by the very first inhabitants, when this place was just an island in the middle of a marsh.”

  Agatha felt a shiver run down her spine. “How marvelous to be the one to have discovered all this.”

  “There’s more still to be found, of course.” His face was in shadow, but the tone of his voice—softer but with an edge of excitement—betrayed his obvious sense of pride. “We’ll go back up now—to where Abraham lived.”

  As they wound their way through the ruins aboveground, he brought everything to life in vivid detail. He became quite animated, leading them through the narrow streets, miming knocking on doors and explaining that,
thanks to the cuneiform tablets found at the site, they knew the name of every occupant. A merchant, a tailor, a jeweler, or a schoolmaster—he knew whether they had failed or prospered in their line of business, how many children they had had, and how old they were when they died. He was showing them the site of an inn when Michael pulled up in Queen Mary, offering a lift back to the expedition house.

  Nancy—who had tagged along when they came up from the pit—turned to Agatha. “Do you mind if I go back? I could do with a lie-down.”

  “Of course not—would you like me to come with you?”

  “No—stay and hear the rest. This is what you’ve come for. I’ll be fine.”

  Leonard Woolley cleared his throat in a rather theatrical way. Clearly, he didn’t like his show being interrupted. The door slammed and Nancy was off in a trail of dust.

  “Now for the moon temple.” Leonard cocked his head toward the ziggurat, whose stepped walls cast a monstrous shadow on the sand.

  He led Agatha and Max up an outside staircase flanked by two parallel rows of steps. “Abraham was a moon worshipper before he was told to leave Ur and worship Jehovah instead,” he said as they climbed high over the desert. “The moon god was the principal deity all over Arabia—his legacy still exists in the crescent moon symbol of Islam.” He made his way inside the ziggurat, into what he told Agatha was a sort of antechamber to the shrine. “We have to go through there.” He pointed to a narrow archway no more than five feet high. “There’s a spiral staircase beyond it—rather claustrophobic, I’m afraid: the ancient Sumerians were quite a bit shorter than we are.” He took an oil lamp from a shelf cut into the wall and lit it. “Just follow me,” he said.

  Leonard, who had hardly an ounce of fat, disappeared through the arch with no trouble, but Agatha found that her hips were too wide for the aperture, so she had to go in sideways.

  A short passageway brought her to the foot of a twisting row of mud-brick steps, which were just visible in the leaping beam of light cast by the lamp up ahead. She had to bend her head to avoid knocking it on the roof as she climbed up. After the first turn of the staircase, she was in almost total darkness, feeling her way along the rough walls. She could hear the distant echo of Leonard’s footsteps. He hadn’t said how many stairs there were or how long it would take to reach the shrine. She felt sweat trickle down her back. The air was dry and full of dust. Suddenly she panicked. Unable to go on, she took a step backward, trying in vain to turn around in the tight space.

  “Oh!”

  She had forgotten that Max was right behind her. She felt the firmness of his chest against her back, his thighs against her buttocks. In that split second her panic was eclipsed by a very different feeling: the erotic sensation of this man’s body pressed against hers. It set off something deep inside, a fizzing, tingling sensation, shocking in its familiarity.

  She broke away, stumbling back onto the step she had just vacated. “I’m so sorry . . . I—”

  “Are you all right?” Max reached out to her in the darkness. “Here’s my arm. Hold on: I’m just going to light a match.” His face appeared in a halo of light. “There we are: Can you see where you’re going now? It’s only a few more steps to the top.”

  Agatha groaned when she saw how close she was to the end of the staircase. “Oh dear,” she said. “You must think me very pathetic.”

  “Not at all,” he said, and then smiled. “I don’t blame you for panicking. Leonard’s always haring off at a hundred miles an hour. Doesn’t consider what it’s like for people who are not used to it.” The match went out so he lit another. “I’ll ask him to let you have the lamp on the way down.”

  When they caught up with Leonard, he was sitting on a sort of throne carved into the far wall of a bare, low-ceilinged room.

  “Is this the shrine?” Agatha tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  “You have to imagine it as it was in Abraham’s time,” Leonard replied. “It was the last word in luxury: glazed with sky-blue bricks, silk carpets on the floor, huge sofas for the king and his handmaidens to lie on, gold plates and goblets for the food and wine. And over there,” he said, “was an enormous statue of Nannar, the moon god. He was represented as an old man in a turban with a beard the color of lapis lazuli. Every evening he got into his bark—which to mortals appeared in the form of a brilliant crescent moon—and set sail across the night sky.”

  The flickering light of the lamp gave the room a rather sinister look. Agatha remembered what Katharine had said about the bizarre ceremonies that had taken place here.

  “This place was steeped in magic,” Leonard went on. And then, as if he’d heard what she was thinking, he said: “What went on in this room was the most immoral kind of pagan ritual—quite shocking to the modern mind.”

  “Yes: Katharine told me,” Agatha said.

  “Did she?” Leonard looked at her directly for the first time. Something in his eyes told her that this was dangerous territory, that to reiterate the words Katharine had used to describe the ancient fertility rite would provoke acute embarrassment in her host.

  “She told me about the death ritual, too,” she said, as a way of changing the subject. “Quite terrifying, I imagine, if you were a wife or servant of the king. You’d be watching him all the time, wouldn’t you—if he was ill or anything, I mean: wondering if he was going to die.”

  Leonard nodded. His eyes were still on her. She felt uncomfortable under that piercing gaze. “Hard to countenance, isn’t it?” he said. “But there are remnants of that kind of practice to this day. The suttee ritual in India, for example, where the widow throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre: it was outlawed a century ago, but it’s still regarded by some Hindus as the ultimate form of womanly devotion.”

  There was a slight inflection on those last two words. Was it her imagination or was there a harsh edge to the way he said them? There was a bad feeling in this room, an almost tangible sense of menace. Was it the legacy of those unnatural acts of long ago—or the rivalry between the two men who stood here now?

  CHAPTER 20

  Max and Agatha rode back to the expedition house on a pair of mules. The other members of the dig team had already gone home for lunch, but Agatha said she wasn’t really hungry, so Max suggested taking her back by the scenic route.

  It was only four miles, but the terrain made the going slow for the animals. This was a relief to Agatha, who found mules only slightly less intimidating than camels.

  “We have to cross the wadi in a minute,” Max said as he drew level with her. “It’s quite shallow at the moment—you won’t get your feet wet.”

  As they came down the side of a sand dune, Agatha saw a ribbon of sparkling water, its banks peppered with wildflowers. The delicate red tulips she had seen in the vase on her windowsill grew alongside purple irises and feathery white tufts of what looked like cow parsley.

  “That’s the Bedouin village—over there.” Max was looking out toward the western horizon. Agatha could just make out a wooden palisade, above which were the domed ceilings of tents, identical in color to the sand that surrounded them. “We’ll be visiting them later in the week,” Max went on. “They’ve invited us all to a feast.”

  “Really? How exciting!” Agatha shaded her eyes. “They’re not a threat, then? Katharine said you’d had trouble with rumors spreading about the finds at the dig.”

  “We pay the local tribe to protect us,” he replied. “The chieftain has a small army of men who patrol the area, keeping a lookout for bandits. He has the most wonderful title: Sheikh Munshid of the Ghazi.” He smiled, eyes twinkling from a dust-covered face. “I think I’d like to come back as a Bedouin sheikh—they all seem to have at least ten wives.”

  Agatha gave him a dubious look.

  “Only joking! It’s the nomadic element of their lives that appeals to me: that ability to up sticks and travel whenever and wherever it suits them. I wouldn’t mind it at all—wandering about the desert, living in a
tent, always finding new places to explore . . .” He trailed off with a shrug. “We lived in tents when we first came here. It wasn’t practical for long, though, given the stuff we were unearthing. Have you seen the Antiquities Room?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I expect Katharine will want to show it to you herself. If Leonard doesn’t lock himself in there for the afternoon, that is.”

  “He’s very passionate, isn’t he?” Agatha glanced at Max, watching his face. She had deliberately not said about his work.

  Max raised his hand to wipe away a trickle of perspiration that had made a path through the dust on the left side of his face. The movement screened his eyes from her view. “Yes,” he said. “He’s probably the most dedicated man I’ve ever met. Works all the hours God sends. And he’s brilliant at remembering facts: even the ones he’s made up.”

  “Oh?” This threw her.

  “All that stuff about Abraham and Noah—you mustn’t take it as gospel.” He was looking directly at her now. “We’ve searched high and low for a tablet that mentions Abraham by name, but nothing’s emerged so far. And that layer of alluvial clay he pointed out: yes, it indicates a flood. But there’s no proof of it being the Great Flood—the one in Genesis.”

  “But he seemed so sure . . .”

  “It’s all part of the show.” Max huffed out a breath. “For the benefit of people who might have the wherewithal to keep the expedition going for as long as it takes him to find the evidence to back it all up.” He paused. “I hope you won’t think me impolite for drawing your attention to it. I just wanted to warn you, that’s all. The Woolleys are quite a team: they know how to charm people. But you mustn’t feel you have to give in to them.”

  He moved away then, steering his mule down the bank toward the streambed. As Agatha followed behind, his words echoed in her head. Had he given in to them? Allowed Katharine to steal his heart only to cast him aside when a better prospect presented itself? The thought of it wormed away at her as they splashed through the wadi and urged their animals up the other side. Max was so attentive, so patient, always mindful of the needs of other people. In that sense, he was the polar opposite of Katharine, who, for all her charm, clearly had her own interests uppermost.