Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000
Murder in a Time of Siege
by Marjorie Eccles
Yorkshire-born novelist and short story writer Marjorie Eccles has a new book coming out in the U.S. next month. The Superintendent’s Daughter (St. Martin’s Press) features Ms. Eccles’s long-running series character, Police Superintendent Gil Mayo, the hero of more than a dozen previous novels. Her new short story for EQMM is a nonseries work set in 1899, during the Boer War.
They would soon be reduced to eating the horses. The idea was anathema to any I Britisher. They would do if it was a question of survival, but thank God it hadn’t come to that, not yet.
The small township in the middle of nowhere lay sweltering on the unending, sun-scorched expanse of the African veldt. A hitherto pleasant, orderly, and uneventful place, now seething with fifteen hundred defending troops, surrounded by the enemy, Mafeking had suddenly found itself turned into a garrison by virtue of its strategic position on the borderland railway.
The first actions of the Boers had been to cut through the telegraph wires, tear up two miles of railway, and seize the waterworks outside the redoubts — though as to this last, they might have saved themselves the trouble: There remained an ample supply of water within the town from tanks, and wells drilled through the rock. Three months of siege had followed, yet morale stayed resolutely high. Though the bombardment had been heavy, loss of life and the numbers of wounded had been comparatively light so far, mostly confined to the military in their storming parties against the enemy. Relief was expected daily, but was not yet forthcoming. Belts were tightened further, while the overall commander, Colonel Baden-Powell, the idol and hero of the hour, continued to keep General Cronjé and his Afrikaners busy, driving them back with his cavalry sorties and causing them considerable losses. His indefatigable, cheery confidence was immensely heartening to the beleaguered townsfolk. Better than a pint of dry champagne any day, good old B.P.!
Undeterred, the Boers celebrated the first day of the new century by shelling the women’s laager. Fortunately, only one person was slightly injured.
Then, on the ninety-ninth day of the siege, Edward Carradine was arrested for murder.
“Mafeking, upon the hundredth day of siege, sends loyal devotion to your Majesty and assurances of continued resolve to maintain your Majesty’s supremacy in this town.”
Having despatched his doughty telegram to his queen, via a trooper valiant enough to risk breaking through the enemy lines and riding with it to Pretoria, Mr. Frank Whiteley, the mayor of Mafeking, forsook his bicycle for once and made his way on foot down the main street. The town lay baking under the dry wind; red, gritty dust puffed out from under his boots at every step. An upright man with a clear and steady gaze, he was deeply tanned by his many years under the suns of Africa, thinner than he had been, by reason of the privations to which they had all been subjected in recent months here in Mafeking. He had followed the business of an Interior trader and hunter, in partnership with a brother-in-law in Bulawayo, since he was seventeen, and no one was better acquainted with the territories and people of Bechuanaland and the country north of the Limpopo than he. He loved and understood Africa and the African people almost as much as he honoured England and the English, His hard years in this land had made him a man of foresight and courage. But at the moment, he was also a man beset by worries: the great loss to him of his company stores, recently reduced to rubble by heavy shelling, his business already in decline because of the war, the longing for his absent wife and children, the continuing need to eke out food supplies. The responsibility — entirely his — of looking after five hundred women, children, and nuns in the women’s laager. And not least, the troubling business of Edward Carradine, an all-consuming anxiety which almost eclipsed all the rest.
Carradine! That unfortunate young man who had arrived in Mafeking with such high hopes and was even now languishing in a makeshift gaol until he could be moved to prison in Pretoria.
Although he was of a good family, his people English immigrants who had interests in the diamond industry in Kimberley, and it was understood that he would, in time, come into a not inconsiderable inheritance, Edward Carradine was of that new breed which needed to prove that they could make their own way in the world, a young man of independence who had chosen railway engineering as his special field. Due to this, he had been called to Mafeking to work on the Bechuanaland Railway. On the outbreak of hostilities, he had immediately leaped, with characteristic enthusiasm and impetuosity, into the foray as a volunteer fighter in the amateur army, four hundred of them native Africans, who augmented the forces drawn from the ranks of the British South Africa police and the five-hundred-strong force of Colonel Hore’s irregular cavalry. Since the township was bursting at the seams with police, the mayor should have felt able to leave Edward Carradine to them, despite their somewhat backward methods of detection, but he could not. It was a damnable business, but he could not simply wash his hands of this rash young man, a friend, a fellow-Britisher, tiresome and foolhardy though he had turned out to be.
Nor could he push the problem aside in his homeward progress; at every step he was greeted by friends and acquaintances wanting to discuss Carradine and the whys and wherefores of his incarceration. And when eventually he thought he had spoken to the very last of them, coming towards him was that prince of good fellows, Baden-Powell himself, but having other things on his mind, thank God, than Carradine. “Never fear, Frank,” he greeted the mayor, “we shall win through, come what may, and no small thanks to you and your calmness in the face of adversity. We are fortunate indeed in having such a stout fellow to maintain and support us in our efforts!”
Frank was uneasy with such compliments. A man of action, he preferred deeds to words. He was a notable game-shot and had had desperate adventures, had escaped being trampled by a rogue elephant and had saved a companion from a rhinoceros by great personal daring, and still his only comment on being congratulated on his bravery had been: “It was to be done, and I did it.”
He waved the flies away and sought an answer now as B.P. clasped his shoulder and made further congratulatory remarks on his capable administration.
“I said at the beginning I would sit tight and keep my hair on, and that’s all I have done,” he replied at last with a smile, taking off his hat and wiping his face with a bandanna.
The mayor’s noble brow, compensated for by his luxuriant, drooping moustache, attested to the fact that this was not to be taken literally, and the twinkle in B.P.’s eye showed he appreciated the joke. “That’s the ticket! It’ll take more than brother Boer to prevent we Britishers from holding aloft the flag, eh? Nil desperandum, Frank, nil desperandum has always been my motto!” And with the parting shot that Lord Roberts had promised relief within a few weeks and he had therefore placed the garrison on full rations again, the intrepid commander went on his way down the street, whistling and cheerful as though he had no cares in the world.
Frank accepted most of these last comments with reservations, having more knowledge of the stubbornness of the Boer character than most of the British commanders. He had the greatest admiration for Baden-Powell’s leadership qualities, but it was with growing alarm that he thought of the colonel’s last rash statement, relative to his own rapidly dwindling stores of provisions, hitherto so carefully husbanded. When the events of war began moving to a crisis, he had foreseen the strong possibility that Mafeking might fall under siege, and its people be forced to capitulate, not to the Boers, but to starvation. Planning for survival was second nature to him and, prepared for the worst, he had collected enormous stores of staple foods and medical supplies. The resulting diet was monotonous, to be sure, with no fresh meat other than that obtained through forages by the soldiery into the local African villages — something which the mayor strongly deplored. But it was a diet which kept hunger at bay. It was in no small part due to his native Yorkshire prudence that the story of the resistance of the gallant little garrison, which had not been expected to last out a month, had already become the stuff of legend back home in England.