We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [95]
He looked earnestly at Joseph to see if he understood.
“I told her that was silly, but she knew that already. Makes people angry with her. She was pretty enough, more than most. I said to her not to sell herself cheap. I didn’t go too far because I didn’t want her to think I was after her, but I tried to get her to think well of herself.” He searched Joseph’s face anxiously.
Joseph saw the kindness in him, the sense of pity for a young woman afraid and foolish, probably like thousands of other women who saw what had once been an assured future disappearing as an army of young men melted into the earth and all the old patterns of behavior shifted.
“When was that?” Joseph asked.
“About midnight,” Tiddly answered. “Maybe one o’clock.”
“Then where were you between half past three and half past four?”
“In the Evacuation tent, like I said.”
“With Cully Teversham?”
Tiddly Wop said nothing. His silence confirmed the truth.
Joseph waited. He would dearly like to have believed him, but he could not afford even a single lie, no matter how much it was better or easier than the truth.
Tiddly Wop sighed. “You aren’t going to leave it, are you, Chaplain?”
“No. Where were you, Tiddly?”
“In the Evacuation tent! It’s just that Cully weren’t there. He said he was to cover for me.”
“Why?”
Tiddly looked at Joseph, his eyes begging for a leniency, an understanding. “’Cause I pulled him off the wire at Passchendaele an’ he reckons he owes me something. I didn’t ask him for that. Don’t drop him in it, Chaplain, please?”
“Who else was in the Evacuation tent, Tiddly?”
“No one. I swear! But before you go blaming Cully, or thinking he did anything, he was with Snowy Nunn that time, but Snowy’s gone back up to the front again. And that’s the truth!”
Joseph believed him. He understood the debt of honor. Any man who owed his life to someone else never forgot it. Cully was like tens of thousands of others. Joseph had not known that Tiddly Wop had saved him. It was just one more piece of heroism done for its own sake, no recognition expected or wished for. It was what you did for friends.
“Yes,” Joseph acknowledged. “Where was Moira Jessop?”
“I don’t know. But she wasn’t in the Evacuation tent.”
Joseph thanked him and left him to go find Moira Jessop and question her again.
She was asleep, taking advantage of a brief respite. She had worked all night and he felt unkind disturbing her, but there was no time for such considerations. Added to which, of course, if she were called to an emergency he would not be able to speak to her anyway.
“What is it, Chaplain?” she said, fumbling to straighten her dress and collect her thoughts. She sat upright and scraped her hair back into something like neatness, even if it was unflatteringly tight.
“I need to talk to you about Sarah Price,” he said, standing in front of her.
Her face clouded. “I don’t know anything more than I’ve already told you. She flirted with the Germans.” Her face pulled into lines of distaste, her lips tight. She was sitting more stiffly now, the gray fabric of her dress stretched a little over her shoulders. “Of course I wouldn’t say she deserved it, but she certainly invited it in a way none of the rest of us would think of. She had no…modesty.