by Anne Perry
Tiddly Wop had been mending duckboards. There was no point—they would not need them much longer—but it was better than idleness. He put down the hammer as Joseph’s shadow fell across him.
“What can I do for you, Chaplain?” he asked. “I really don’t know anything more.”
“Yes, you do,” Joseph answered, squatting down on a pile of sandbags opposite him. “Where were you the night Sarah Price was killed, Tiddly? The truth.”
“I was in the Evacuation tent,” Tiddly Wop said doggedly. “I already told you that.”
“Yes, you did. And Cully Teversham told me so, too. But Moira Jessop said you weren’t, the first time I asked her. And she said the same thing to Jacobson.”
Tiddly Wop looked unhappy. “Don’t know why she’d say that.”
“No, neither do I,” Joseph agreed. “She said later that you might have been; they were all so busy she couldn’t be sure. But that’s not true, either. The Evacuation tent was actually pretty quiet. Between half past three and half past four there was no one in there at all. And that’s the time that counts.”
Tiddly Wop blinked. “Is it? Is that when…when she was killed?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know that?”
“No. I…I saw her earlier.” Again he looked away. “She was pretty upset. I tried to make her feel a bit better.” He mumbled the words as if he was embarrassed by them.
“What was she upset about?” Joseph persisted.
“Lots of things,” Tiddly Wop answered, his voice thick with sadness.
“That’s not an answer,” Joseph told him. “This girl’s dead, Tiddly. We need to know what happened to her, and why. Why may be the only way we catch the man who did it. I’m not going to repeat it if I don’t have to. What was she upset about?”
“She was afraid of going home,” Tiddly Wop said slowly, searching for the words he needed. “She knew things had changed. She’d only been out here a year or so, but she realized that it isn’t ever going to be like it was before. So many young men are dead, and two or three times as many are injured, or crippled, or just different.” He looked sad and puzzled. “And women aren’t the way they used to be, either. She felt she wouldn’t fit in anywhere, nobody would marry her, because even though she was pretty enough, she hadn’t any…I don’t know…she didn’t think with all the women there are who are well bred, know how to behave, are charming and modest and good at domestic skills, that anybody’d choose her. And she’d got a bit of a reputation. She was nearly twenty-six. She flirted a good bit. She had a sort of a fling with Benbow, until he got too keen and she ended it. Then she…I don’t know…made sure she could still attract men by flirting something rotten with the German prisoners. Safe, if you like. They can’t do anything, poor sods. She just wanted to boost herself up a bit.”
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. It lowered all of us in the men’s eyes.”
“What did she do?” he asked. That was not what he had been going to say, but he was curious and disturbed by her comment.
“I told you,” she replied. “She flirted with them. Far more than looked after them or attended to their wounds.”
“Are you certain?”
She was angry now.
“If you doubt me, ask Allie Robinson,” she challenged him. “She knows it was cheap and disgusting. For heaven’s sake, these are the men who slaughtered our own boys, whose bodies are shattered by shrapnel, torn on the wires, riddled with bullets, frozen to death. Who in God’s name does she think did it to them?” Her face was white, her voice sharp and rising out of control.
“I expect she knew that, even if she forgot it for the moment,” he said gently. He could understand her anger and the fear of chaos that welled up inside her. You could become drowned in pain, desperate for any kind of right and wrong, anything at all that made sense of something too terrible to bear. The nurses dealt with the worst of it, endlessly, night after night, and they endured the same miserable rations, exhausting hours, and endless hunger, weariness, and cold as the men. Sometimes people forgot it simply because nurses were seldom shot at, and they did not have to shoot back. Their task was always one of mercy. None of them would lie awake in the night sweating with horror as the face of a dying man swam in front of them, and they knew they had killed him. Joseph had held men who wept with terror and guilt over that. The nightmares would never leave some of them.
But nurses had their own nightmares, their own drowning in helplessness. Had the women at home even the faintest idea of their courage, or strength, the steel of endurance that anchored their lives day and night?
“I don’t know anything,” Moira re
peated stiffly. “I already told you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said firmly. “You know where you were, and it was not the Evacuation tent. It’s time for the truth.”
She looked startled, drawing in breath to deny it. Then she met his eyes, obviously realizing that he was not going to accept that. The resistance drained away. “I was with Private Eames,” she said very quietly. She did not explain, but it was unnecessary; her implication was perfectly clear.
“Where?” He tried to keep judgment out of his voice.
“Does it really matter?” The challenge was back, as if he were asking from some prurient curiosity.
“Yes, it does matter,” he replied. “The only hope we have of finding out where people actually were is to get as much of the truth as possible, and weed out the lies. Unfortunately you are far from the only one to say they were somewhere they weren’t.”
She blushed hotly. “I don’t know who killed her!”
“Somebody does. Where were you?”
“On the far side of the water drums.” It was almost an accusation in return, as if he were to blame for driving her to it. It was a muddy and miserable spot; they could not have been doing more than kissing at the most. Perhaps that was what she meant him to know.
“Out of sight of the Germans’ hut,” he observed aloud.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes, or fifteen.”
He automatically assumed it could have been more. She would err on the side that excused her, and—perhaps of greater importance—that excused Eames, who had left his post.
“I won’t report it this time, if I can avoid it,” he said to her. “But if that time is crucial to Sarah’s murder, then I might have to.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it!” she said indignantly. “Nor did Private Eames.”
“Yes, he did, Nurse Jessop. He was away from his duty, and so he cannot account for what happened around the German prisoners’ hut. One of them may have come out. Also, of course, Sergeant Benbow cannot account for himself, either. And he lied, because he said they were together.”
She was now very shaken. She had obviously not allowed her mind to travel so far. But she was angry, and she refused to apologize. He left her sitting on the cot, miserable and defensive.
He confirmed what she had said with Eames, then sought out Benbow and confronted him with his lie.
Benbow looked acutely uncomfortable, and a tide of guilt swept up his lean face. “He was having a bit of a fling with Nurse Jessop,” he said, not looking directly at Joseph. “Didn’t see that it mattered. He wasn’t gone long.”
“How long, do you know?”
Benbow hesitated.
“You don’t know,” Joseph said for him. “Which means you are not accounted for, either. It’s time for the truth, Benbow. It would be better if you gave it to me honestly rather than my having to drag it out of others. Any lie is a form of guilt at this point, whatever you are lying to conceal: your error, or anyone else’s.”
Benbow looked wretched. “I don’t know how long he was gone,” he said in a low, hard voice. “I wasn’t there, either, not when he came back. I think it was only a few minutes we were both gone.”
“You think?” Joseph said softly. “Did you lie to cover Eames or yourself?”
“Both.” Benbow hesitated again. “I was with Sarah Price, but only at the water. I helped her carry a bucket and stopped to talk to her for a few minutes. She was looking after some of the German wounded. I was angry with her for flirting with them. She seemed to prefer them to us.” His hands were clenched, and the muscles were tight in his neck and jaw. “It was then that I realized why. She liked to tease them, flirt, bait them a bit. Fun, she called it. But the poor bastards couldn’t do anything about it. Most of them were too badly shot up, and scared stiff of what would happen to them—even more, to their women at home—and she liked that.”
“You’re not painting a picture of a very pleasant young woman,” Joseph observed.
Benbow glared at him, then gave a short bark of laughter. “It’s a true one.”
“I am assuming, Corporal, that you knew her fairly well?”
Benbow colored again. “She was around a lot.”
Joseph said no more on the subject, but neither did he promise Benbow not to report it if it should become necessary. Instead he went to speak with the German prisoners, to see if any of them could corroborate how long Eames or Benbow was absent from duty.
He asked Schenckendorff first. He looked pale still, but his foot was less inflamed and his fever appeared to have gone. Now he faced the possibility of being tried for murder and hanged, and his eyes held a black humor at the irony of it, but he had summoned all the strength he possessed to mask his fear.
He corroborated Benbow’s story, hope flaring up for an instant that somehow it would help prove his own innocence, then dying when Joseph did not say so.
“I’m closer to the truth,” Joseph said quietly. “But I’m not there yet.”
“I did not do it,” Schenckendorff replied. “I stood outside on the earth for a little while, and felt the rain. I spoke to no one. The girl who was killed was the one who came in here and laughed and joked with our men? A very pretty girl, but shallow, I think, perhaps frightened, and cruel at times. It is terrible that she was killed. I’m sorry. Stupidity does not deserve such a fearful punishment. We are all stupid at times, led blindly by our hopes or fears. Too busy looking at what we are running away from to see what we are running into.”
Joseph said nothing. Schenckendorff could have been speaking of a dozen different things, physical, emotional, or moral. In another time and place he could have liked the man, even been his friend. Now all that mattered was to clear him of blame so they could get him to London in time.
Joseph rose to leave, and as he was walking past the cots one of the prisoners spoke to him in excellent English, calling him by name. Joseph stopped. There was something familiar about the voice, but he could not place it.
“Chaplain?” the man repeated. He was lean and dark with prominent features, handsome in his own way.
“Do I know you?” Joseph asked, puzzled.
The man smiled. His head was bandaged, and there was still blood oozing over his right ear. There was also heavy padding on his right shoulder and arm. “Feldwebel Eisenmann,” he answered. “We discussed English football in no-man’s-land, 1915. I’m glad to see that you are all right. Can you tell me if my friend Corporal Goldstone is still alive, please?”
Joseph remembered the incident with a sudden glow of warmth. It had been terrifying one moment, overwhelmingly funny the next. They had discussed Arsenal’s dismal defense against Chelsea, as if it actually mattered—a moment of beautiful sanity in the middle of hell. Two Jews and a Church of England chaplain lost in a waste of mud and corpses, talking about a football game, and parting as friends.
“Yes, he is, Feldwebel,” Joseph replied. “He got a blighty one about a year ago. Lost his left foot, but he’s adjusting well. I hear from him every so often. I’ll write and tell him I saw you.”
“Tell him I lost my right ear,” Eisenmann said. “He’ll see the joke in that. He always said I couldn’t sing. By the way, I have a message for you.” He smiled, a sweet, gentle look in his eyes. “From a man called Sam. Tall fellow, dark hair. Did some work in Germany and said he’s going to stay there, at least for the time being. Asked you if you’d do him a favor and tell his brother the truth. Does that make sense? And he said, ‘Be happy.’ Tell a good joke and eat a chocolate biscuit for him.”
Joseph felt the warmth flood through him. Of all the friends the war had taken from him, he missed Sam Wetherall, a fugitive for three years now, more than any other. “Yes, the most excellent sense,” he replied. “Thank you, Feldwebel. I am much in your debt.” He turned and left before emotion overtook him. He wanted to be alone outside, to walk in the rain along the old trenches, to recapture m
emory and the companionships that had been the best of it. He wanted to remember the voices, the laughter, the eyes of all those he knew so well who would stay here after the rest of them had gone home, when the good and bad of war had drifted into the past and become stories told to people who had no idea what it had really been like.
Judith also was working on everything she could. The increasingly clear picture of Sarah Price that emerged was easy to understand, and to pity, but less easy to like.
“Loose,” Allie said pithily. “Heaven knows, anyone can understand falling in love. We’re all lonely, frightened, and very much aware that what we lose the chance for now we may never have again. But Sarah didn’t love. In a way you could say she was always lying, promising something she didn’t even have, much less intend to give!” Her face was bleak with anger and a consuming pain. “By being what she was, cruel and vulgar, she betrayed us all.”
“Betrayed us?” Judith repeated with confusion. She was not understanding.
Allie stared at her with frustration bordering on contempt. “The men who died out here, the wounded and broken, everyone they loved at home—we must be worthy of it. She wasn’t! She mocked them. She had no loyalty.” She looked away. There was a bitterness and a deep, harsh anger in her voice. “Over centuries men and women have given all they had to make the England we love. If we let ourselves become cheap and grubby now, we betray the dead not just of this war, but of all wars. Every sacrifice made in two thousand years is wasted. What irony if we beat the Germans, then let the prize slip out of our own hands into the mud to be trodden on.”
“You can give it away for yourself,” Judith said firmly. “You can’t give it away for others.”
Allie continued to glare at her. “Of course you can, you stupid woman! You can give it away for all the people who follow you! What are you going to teach your children? Are you going to teach them honor and chastity and how to care for others and be loyal and patient and decent? Or how to take everything you can for yourself, make sure you know all of your rights—and none of your duties?”
