“I’m not sure I believe in God. Not Len’s version of him, anyway: a god who sends floods and famines and plagues of locusts when people don’t toe the line.”
“Or this.” Agatha’s fingers traced the outline of Nancy’s forehead. She peeled away the warm, damp cloth, dipping it in the bowl of water. “Whatever she’s done, she doesn’t deserve this.”
Sometime during the night, when the only sound in the Bedouin village was the distant bleating of the goats, Nancy suddenly sat up, throwing off the blanket that covered her.
“Where am I?”
Katharine, who had dozed off, woke with a start. Agatha was already on her feet.
“You’re quite safe,” Agatha said. “We’re at the Bedouin village. You weren’t well enough to go back to the expedition house.”
“Where’s James?”
“Fast asleep. One of the Bedouin women is looking after him. He’s not far away—just next door.” Katharine and Agatha exchanged glances. This was the first time in almost a week that Nancy had been lucid.
“Would you like something to drink?” Katharine reached for a cup of water, but Nancy waved it away.
“Promise me you’ll look after him!” The look in Nancy’s eyes was heartbreaking.
“Of . . . of course . . .” Katharine cast a desperate look at Agatha. “But you’ll be—”
“Promise!” Nancy cut her short, sinking back onto the pillow, as if the effort of those few sentences had been too much for her.
“Try to get some rest.” Agatha bent over her, replacing the dried-out cloth that had fallen from her forehead when she sat up.
“You won’t let Felix have him, will you?”
“No.” Katharine took Nancy’s hand in hers. “Felix will never have him. I can promise you that.”
“And you mustn’t tell anyone about his real father . . .” She took a few short, labored breaths. “I can’t have him now. No point in . . .” She trailed off, closing her eyes tight, the pain in her body overwhelming her.
“She needs morphine.” Agatha unscrewed the bottle, squeezing the rubber end of the pipette to fill the glass tube. “Can you get her sitting up for me?”
Katharine put her hand under Nancy’s head. The back of her neck was slick with perspiration. As she raised her up, Nancy’s eyes snapped open.
“Don’t ever let Felix say that James is his. He isn’t.”
“Please, Nancy—don’t worry.” Katharine held her closer. “He’s a beautiful boy and he’s yours: that’s what matters.”
“Just try to drink this.” Agatha brought the cup to Nancy’s lips.
They watched the pain slowly ebb away as the morphine took effect. When Nancy closed her eyes, Katharine lowered her gently back onto the pillow. She kept hold of her hand, propping herself against the pile of rugs so that even if she dozed off, she wouldn’t let go.
Katharine didn’t know how long she sat like that, fighting sleep. She didn’t think she’d drifted out of consciousness, but she must have done so, because the tent was suddenly flooded with the light of the rising sun. As she felt its warmth on her face, she was immediately aware of something else: something cold and heavy on her fingers.
Nancy was dead.
CHAPTER 31
When the sun rose the following morning, Agatha was alone on the roof of the expedition house. Exhausted to the point of being beyond sleep, she had tossed and turned through the night, racked with guilt over Nancy’s death. If only she hadn’t brought her to Ur; if only they had stayed in Baghdad, where there was a hospital; if only she had persuaded Nancy to go back to England instead of toughing it out in a foreign country.
She thought of James, asleep in Katharine’s room, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that had befallen him, his future blighted before it had even begun. When he had opened his eyes yesterday, his mother’s last words were ringing in her ears.
Don’t ever let Felix say that James is his. He isn’t.
Even on her deathbed Nancy had been absolutely emphatic. Agatha had wondered, fleetingly, if this was a last desperate attempt to thwart Felix’s plans to take the little boy. But when James had looked up at her, she had known with sudden certainty that there was no question as to who his father was. Those eyes, cloudy and unfocused in the first few days after his birth, had taken on a startling clarity.
Diamond-bright.
Yes, she had seen those eyes before. In the face of the man on the Orient Express. The man she had mistaken for Archie.
The memory of Nancy’s grief that day on the train sent fresh tears streaming down Agatha’s face. She tried in vain to rub them away as the colors of the sky melted into a blur of pink and gold.
“Agatha . . .”
She hadn’t heard him coming.
Max was suddenly there, kneeling beside her, his arms cradling her shoulders.
“There are no words, are there?” he whispered. He gathered her up, and she cried into his shirt, letting it all out at last. Telling him, in staccato sentences punctuated by sobs, of the guilt that overwhelmed her every time she closed her eyes.
“But you couldn’t possibly have known what would happen,” he said, stroking her hair. “Did you even know she was expecting a baby?”
Agatha nodded. “B . . . but she said she was only about s . . . six months pregnant.”
“You didn’t make her come with you, though.” She felt his chest rise as he took in a breath. “There’s more than a chance both she and the baby would be dead if you hadn’t acted so calmly out there by the river.”
Agatha answered with a muffled sob.
“Would it help to get away for a while? Could you manage a bit of mule riding?” He cupped her chin in his hand, his dark eyes searching hers. “I go to the little church at Ur Junction Sunday mornings—gives me a chance to escape this lot for a few hours—and it’s a lovely way to travel on a morning like this.”
She blinked away the residue of tears, uncertain what to say. She liked the idea of going for a ride across the desert, but she wasn’t sure about going to a service.
“You wouldn’t have to come to Mass if you didn’t feel like it,” he went on. “There’s a stall on the station platform where you can get coffee and a bite to eat.”
“What about James? He’ll be awake soon.”
“I’m sure Katharine and the others are capable of looking after him for a few hours. Don’t worry—I’ll leave a note on the table.”
The air was sharp with the scent of yellow chamomile and wild parsley. The rain that had followed the sandstorm had brought new life to the desert, turning paths into temporary streams where plants sprung up when the water subsided.
They rode in silence at first. She sensed that Max was waiting to see if she wanted to talk. For a while she didn’t trust herself to open her mouth. She didn’t want to start crying again. She was a few yards behind him, following in his wake, when she saw something drift onto the back of his shirt. At first she thought it was a clump of petals blown on the breeze, but as she drew closer, she saw it move. A butterfly. Unlike any she had ever seen. Its wings were the color of the sea on a summer morning. Turquoise threaded with black.
“Max!”
He turned in the saddle as she caught up with him. Reaching forward, she touched the fabric of his shirt.
“What is it?”
“A butterfly.” As she spoke, it crept onto her index finger. Slowly, she withdrew her hand, bringing it round to show him.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” He stroked the back of her wrist as she held it out. “You don’t see many butterflies out here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that color.”
As they watched, it lifted a leg to its feelers, as if it was grooming itself. Then it opened its wings and glided away. Agatha felt suddenly uplifted. To put the feeling into words would have sounded mawkish, but she clung to it all the same: the butterfly was like a harbinger of hope.
“I remember watching a butterfly the day Esme died,” Max said, as if readin
g her mind. “It was a beautiful morning—sunny and warm—and it seemed terribly wrong that the world could go on like that when he was no longer in it. I went out into the garden of the villa and sat there for a long time. I felt so guilty just for being alive. Then a butterfly landed on a flower just in front of me.” He paused, shifting his weight in the saddle. “It made me think about a story I read as a child, where fairies in a wood came and asked a family of caterpillars if they could have their skins to make fur coats. The caterpillars were outraged. They thought the fairies meant to kill them. But they said no, that wasn’t what they meant at all—but they knew a time would come when the caterpillars wouldn’t need their coats anymore, because they’d have something much more beautiful to wear.”
“What did they say—the caterpillars?”
“They didn’t believe it. They sent the fairies packing.”
Agatha swallowed hard as tears pricked the back of her eyes. “I used to believe. In heaven, I mean. But now . . .” She sucked in a breath, unable to voice the confusion she felt inside.
Max reached across the space between them, squeezing her arm. “It’s not easy to believe in anything when your whole world turns upside down. The main thing is to keep believing in yourself.”
Katharine was watching James while he slept. One arm was stretched up by his ear, and every so often his fingers opened and closed, like a sea anemone in a rock pool. Sometimes he was so still, she was afraid he had stopped breathing. She’d put her hand mirror over his mouth, unable to breathe herself until she saw the glass mist up.
“Is he all right?” Leonard’s face appeared round the door. He had brought her a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast. “I thought you might want breakfast in here.” He set the tray down on the floor, then crouched down beside her. “He’s very good, isn’t he? I didn’t hear a thing during the night.”
“Thank goodness he’s too young to understand.”
At the sound of their voices, James suddenly opened his eyes. He looked from Katharine to Leonard, his mouth puckering in bewilderment as he took in the unfamiliar face with its bushy beard.
Katharine scooped him up before he made a sound, using the trick Agatha had taught her. She stroked his cheek with her thumb, and he nuzzled against it.
“You’re very good with him.” There was nothing grudging in the way he said it. No hint of jealousy or resentment. It gave her the courage to say what she’d lain awake most of the night fretting over.
“Could we keep him, Len?” The words came out like a genie let out of a bottle. Her mouth went dry as she watched his face. Never in her life had she wanted something so much.
“Keep him?” He was looking at her in the way he looked at objects when they came out of the sand, a mixture of puzzlement and intense concentration as he worked out just what he had unearthed. “But he’s not ours.”
“He’s not anyone’s anymore. Agatha and I are the nearest thing to parents that he has.”
“But there must be somebody—an aunt or an uncle . . . or grandparents?”
“Nancy was an only child and her parents are dead.”
“What about the father?”
“We have no idea who he is, other than that he’s a married man who lives in London.”
“But surely he could be traced: a notice in the Times, perhaps?”
“He already has a child, Len—a little girl. What do you think it would do to his family if it all came out?”
“Doesn’t he have a right to know?”
“Nancy didn’t want to destroy his family. It was the last thing she said before she died.”
Slowly, Leonard lifted his hand. It hovered above the baby’s head, as if he was afraid to touch. A look of awe crossed his face as his fingers made contact with the soft black down. “He’s a fine little chap. But I . . . ,” he faltered as his eyes met hers. “I didn’t realize this was something you wanted.”
“Neither did I—until now.”
“I never told you, but I always hoped to have a child one day. I wanted the chance to be a better parent than my own father had been. When you told me about . . . well, I accepted it then, of course—that it couldn’t be.”
“But it could be, couldn’t it?” Katharine whispered. “Think what a wonderful life we could give him, you and me.”
His raised his hand a couple of inches, from James’s head to her cheek. His fingers felt warm as he touched her. “Yes we could, couldn’t we?”
Agatha sat on a rickety wooden bench at the end of the platform at Ur Junction, sipping Turkish coffee from a tin mug. The sun felt good on her skin, and she couldn’t help smiling at the antics of the stationmaster as he attempted to herd people and animals onto an already packed train—his hat knocked askew as he was prodded by flailing limbs and tumbling luggage. It was like watching an Arab version of Laurel and Hardy.
She could hear music coming through the corrugated tin walls of the little church. Max was already inside. She had almost gone in with him, but the thought of doing or saying the wrong thing in a service she was unfamiliar with put her off. She wasn’t even sure whether non-Catholics were allowed to attend Mass. Max had assured her that God wasn’t bothered about such things, but still she felt uneasy. Deep down she knew that this probably had more to do with her uncertainty about what she believed than anything else.
Max was the only Western person she had seen going into the church. The others were all Indian nuns of various ages and a handful of local people. As the music died away, she saw a group of latecomers hurrying across the rough ground at the edge of the platform. They were young nuns in white habits, followed by a gaggle of small children in Western-style school uniforms. The boys wore gray shorts with white shirts and striped ties, while the girls wore tunics and blouses. Their features were Arabic, like the children she had seen on the streets of Baghdad. As she watched, she saw that one of the nuns was carrying a baby in her arms. It didn’t look much older than James. Max had told her that there was an orphanage attached to the mission at Ur Junction. She wondered if these children were from there.
The thought of it stayed with her long after the little group had disappeared through the doors of the church. The sight of a baby in the arms of a woman who couldn’t have been its mother had triggered a physical ache that wouldn’t go away. What was going to happen to James now? The idea of his being sent to an institution—either here or in England—was unbearable. But what was the alternative?
She thought of the deathbed promise she and Katharine had made to Nancy. They had vowed to look after him. But how? She was a divorcée with a child of her own, and Katharine was a career woman who spent half the year living in the desert. Neither of them was best placed to take on a baby.
She let her mind run on, imagining how it would be if she took him home with her. She tried to imagine how Rosalind would react to the idea of a baby brother. Would she resent him, getting all the attention while she was at boarding school? And what on earth would the papers make of it? She could almost see the headlines: AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MYSTERY BABY. It had been hard enough protecting Rosalind from the aftermath of the Harrogate debacle. However would she cope, at school, with more gossip and innuendo?
She thought of James lying asleep in his improvised bed, of the agony of hearing him cry in the night for a mother who wasn’t there. Was it cowardly to think of her own situation when his need was so great?
She closed her eyes. In her old life, before the divorce, she would have prayed without hesitation. Now it felt hypocritical. But the words slipped, unbidden, into her head. Please, God, tell me what to do.
“Sorry it went on so long!” Max was suddenly there in front of her. “I hope you weren’t too bored.”
She shook her head, amazed at how quickly the time had passed. She asked him how the service had been, and he made her laugh with a story of a bird that had got in through a hole in the roof and left an unpleasant calling card on the priest’s cassock.
She was happy to let
him do all the talking on the ride back home. She didn’t want to think about the onerous decision that lay ahead, didn’t want to feel that ache inside that came whenever James’s face flashed into her mind’s eye.
When they got back to the expedition house, Michael was underneath Queen Mary, tinkering with the undercarriage. He asked Max to give him a hand to fix the starter motor, leaving Agatha to go in alone.
She found Katharine in the courtyard feeding James. He had got the hang of the muslin teat now—sucking away for all he was worth each time she dipped the screwed-up end of the cloth into the bowl of goat’s milk.
“How has he been?” Agatha sat down awkwardly, her legs stiff from the ride.
“As good as gold.” Katharine let out a small sigh.
“How are we ever going to explain it to him?”
“I don’t know.” As Katharine tried to pull the rag from his mouth, James clung on to it, his tiny fist clenched tight. “Perhaps it would be better if he never knew. If he’s adopted soon enough, he never needs to.”
Agatha frowned. “Do you know someone? People in this country or in England?”
“Yes, I know someone.” Katharine looked up as she dipped the rag in the bowl. She wore the same Mona Lisa smile that Agatha had seen on the train. “Me. And Len. We’ve talked it over, and he’s agreed.”
“You?”
“Don’t look so surprised!” Katharine gave a nervous-sounding laugh. “We can’t have a child of our own—so it’s the perfect solution, isn’t it?”
“But I thought—”
“That I wasn’t keen on children? Len said that, too. And it’s true. I didn’t think it mattered, not being able to be a mother. I thought I knew what I wanted: to live like a man, to do a man’s work. Until James came along.”
“But how will you manage—with the dig and everything?”
“Len’s going to talk to Hamoudi about getting one of the Bedouin women from the village to help look after James until we go back to England in the spring. We’ll have a couple more seasons out here—three at the most—so by the time he’s old enough to go to school, we should be settled back in London.”
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