Birrung the Secret Friend Read online

  Dedication

  To Colin Mackellar, first chaplain to the moon and much loved successor to Mr Johnson, with gratitude

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Cheese

  Chapter 2: Me and Elsie

  Chapter 3: House and Garden

  Chapter 4: Dinner

  Chapter 5: Two Mysteries

  Chapter 6: Staying Put

  Chapter 7: My Brilliant Idea

  Chapter 8: The Screams in the Night

  Chapter 9: The Brother

  Chapter 10: Birrung Stays

  Chapter 11: Death Ships

  Chapter 12: The Dead

  Chapter 13: Presents from Birrung

  Chapter 14: I Tell You My Secret

  Author’s Notes

  Also by Jackie French

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  Cheese

  Sydney Cove, December 1789

  I waited in the line outside the storehouse. Only two convicts were before me — big fellows with tattoos on their arms and dirty bare feet — waiting for their rations too. My tummy was so empty it couldn’t even gurgle.

  There was cheese in that storehouse.

  I wanted that cheese so bad I could already feel the maggots wriggling against my tongue. Ma used to say that maggots meant food was going bad, but when your tummy is empty, maggots are just extra food. I’d been eating maggots with my cheese for the two years we’d been here in New South Wales, and hadn’t even got a tummy ache. Not from the maggots, anyways. Hunger ached worse than bad food.

  Elsie and me hadn’t eaten for all yesterday. The storehouse only gave out the rations on Saturdays and Wednesdays. I snuck out to get mine as soon as it got light and the drum went rat-a-tat-tat to call the convicts to work. The convicts in this line must be too sick to work. I hoped they didn’t have the strength to grab my rations before I could get them back to Elsie. But they looked big.

  Just about everyone in the colony was bigger than me. I was small, even for a ten-year-old. How can you grow tall on the slops fed to you in an English gaol or down in the dark and wet hold of a convict ship?

  The man in front of me had his arm in a sling, but he looked as strong as a bullock. I wasn’t going to let him take my cheese. And nothing else neither.

  Elsie didn’t get no rations, so we had to live on mine. We didn’t have no way to keep them safe: ants or rats could eat them, or some thief nick them. So we ate our food as soon as we got it, even if we went hungry in between.

  Only Bullock Man in front of me now. He was nearly as tall as the wild Indians who lived around the colony, but soft looking, not muscled like them, from being chained for nearly a year down in the ships that brought us here, and probably from doing as little as he could since our arrival. Ma used to say most convicts were so lazy they’d eat their toe nails — or someone else’s — before bothering to open an oyster.

  Bullock Man peered in the storehouse door. The storehouse was made of mud, like almost every building in the colony, with big holes from rain and rats. If them holes get any bigger, I thought, those walls won’t keep out robbers, not in a colony of thieves. They’d get our cheese — and all the other food too.

  Food! I was nearly there. My tummy did rumble now.

  The storeman measured Bullock Man’s rations into his pannikin: three cups of flour, a lump of salt pork, rice. The storeman was a convict, like Ma had been. I was no convict. I’d been born free, even if I’d had to stay most of my life with Ma in Newgate Prison back in England, and come with her on the ship here.

  Bullock Man stared at the rice and flour and salt pork in his pannikin. ‘Where’s me cheese?’

  ‘All gone,’ said the storeman.

  ‘Gone?’ demanded Bullock Man. My heart sank as low as my empty tummy. Rice and flour had to be cooked! But me and Elsie could have eaten that cheese straight away.

  The storeman winked at me. ‘You got rice instead,’ he told Bullock Man. ‘Make yourself a nice pudding.’

  ‘What with?’ Bullock Man demanded. He had a point. The governor and some of the officers had cows or goats with milk to make a rice pudding. Not the likes of me or Bullock Man.

  Bullock Man bent down till his head was at the same height as the storeman’s. He grinned, showing two black teeth and swollen red gums. ‘You give me that cheese or somefink nasty is going to happen to you one o’ these nights.’

  The storeman grinned back. He had four teeth, long yellow ones. ‘You might have been a high and mighty back home in Todger’s Lane, matey, with your thief chums bashing folks over their heads to get their purses. But I’m boss of this storehouse. Off with you! Or you’ll find I’ve run out of salt pork too on Saturdays.’

  ‘You ain’t no better than me! You was a pickpocket! At least I had me cudgels. Better than a sneak thief.’

  The storeman stopped grinning. ‘This is a new land, matey. I got a responsible job. I’m king of the storehouse here. So hop it.’

  Bullock Man didn’t hop. But he did move away, muttering, to the corner of the storehouse. He pretended he was leaning on the building to rub his ankle. I moved up to the storeman, keeping a close watch on Bullock Man out of the corner of my eye.

  The storeman grinned at me. ‘Well, Barney Bean, you been growing like a good little bean?’

  I worked up a smile for him. You try living with a name like ‘Bean’. ‘Very funny, sir.’

  ‘You still ain’t got no pannikin?’

  I shrugged. Some thieving Johnny had stolen my pannikin the night Ma died, and there weren’t no more left in the stores to give out. Wasn’t much of anything in the colony any more, except rags and lags and mud. Even most of the Indians had vanished since their plague. We’d been at Port Jackson for nearly two years now, and there’d been no store ship to bring us food and new clothes or spades or pannikins or even news. England and the whole world over the horizon could have vanished and we’d never know.

  You can’t boil dried peas or rice without a pannikin. That’s why me and Elsie needed cheese. You don’t need to cook cheese. And the storeman knew it. I held out my sheet of bark.

  ‘Fish or salt pork?’ asked the storeman.

  I hesitated. You got more fish than pork. But fish goes bad quick.

  ‘Pork,’ I said reluctantly.

  The storeman measured out my salt pork. I only got two-thirds of what a grown-up got. The pork was a square as big as my thumb, hard as a brick and dark as coal. It tasted like coal too. It took a lot of chewing, but didn’t need cooking either.

  Next he measured out my flour. It smelled a bit and wriggled with weevils, but they were no more trouble to me than the maggots. Elsie and me could mix that into damper with water from the Tank Stream and cook it in the ashes of someone else’s fire — after everyone had gone to sleep, of course, so no one could pinch it.

  It was too dangerous to try to keep our own fire going, even if we was cold, in case more thugs found us. Me and Elsie hadn’t anything left to steal, except our clothes and a bit of food, but I was afraid that someone might hurt Elsie. Even if they didn’t, a stranger would scare her bad. I reckoned Elsie had been scared enough already.

  The storeman winked at me again. He held a tiny hunk of cheese, down low where no one could see it.

  I could have eaten that cheese in one gulp. I reached out to take it quickly, afore Bullock Man could see it. My hand trembled with hunger.

  The cheese dropped to the ground. I grabbed it, brushing off the dirt.

  I glanced around. Had Bullock Man seen?

  He had. He stared at my cheese, like it was all the jewels of China. Then he looked at me. His grin spread right across his face, like butter m
elting.

  Even a maggot would guess that Bullock Man planned to grab my rations as soon as I walked past him. But he couldn’t attack me while the storeman was watching. The storeman really was a king, here at the end of the world.

  Someone else watched me too — a girl walking down the muddy track. She was an Indian, one of the natives with black skin. There’d been hundreds of them around when our ships first got here, so many canoes on the harbour with the women fishing and cooking on their smoky fires right there on the water, and feeding fish to their kids.

  The whole harbour had smelled of cooking fish. Sometimes I’d wished I was an Indian, so I could fill my belly with fish too. But back then I had Ma, who was the best ma in the world, even if she wasn’t much good as a pickpocket. And then the Indians vanished, except the dead bodies along the beaches. We’d waited for the plague to kill us too. But it hadn’t. Just the Indians, lying dead on the beaches all around the harbour.

  But here was an Indian again! A live one! She was clothed properly in a dress and shoes. A clean dress, all bright with tiny blue flowers on it, not the nothing colour of convicts’ clothes.

  She was tall, with lots of black hair all shiny in a halo about her head. She was the most beautiful girl I had seen in my life, even with the black skin and all. To be fair I hadn’t seen many pretty girls. It was hard for a girl to look pretty in Newgate, or on the ships that brought us here, down in the dark in the water with dead rats and other stuff I didn’t want to think about all rolling around us on our bunks.

  There weren’t many girls in the colony at all. Governor Phillip had sent most of the young’uns to Norfolk Island, to keep them safe from the convict men. In fact the only girl I knew at all was Elsie, and she was a skinned mouse.

  The Indian girl smiled at me as she passed. She was fifteen, maybe. Her teeth were strong and white. Couldn’t remember ever seeing teeth as strong and white as hers. Couldn’t remember when I’d last seen a smile either.

  Suddenly I forgot how much my tummy hurt with hunger, how the huts around me were crumbling from the rain. The blue sky seemed to dance above the harbour. For a breath or two everything was beautiful, the pale blue new leaves on the native trees, a flock of birds, red and green, yelling above us. I wondered if this girl knew how to sail a canoe, and catch fish, and cook it . . .

  My tummy clenched. I shouldn’t have thought about cooked fish.

  When the plague back in autumn had killed just about every Indian in the world, Surgeon White managed to save two of them, a boy and a girl. Surgeon White had adopted the boy. This must be the black girl Ma told me the clergyman Mr Johnson and his wife were looking after. When we first came here, Ma’d said the Indians might all creep into the colony and at night murder us in our beds. But it’d been them that died.

  I’d glimpsed the Indian girl far off, in her fine clothes, walking with Mr Johnson. But I’d never seen her close like this before, so tall and straight. Her smile was as bright as the sunlight after rain.

  But I didn’t have time to think about smiles and pretty girls. I had to get this food back safe to Elsie. And I had to eat something soon, or I’d go all wobbly and fall faint in the muck on the road and some cove would steal my clothes too, and leave me with nothing except my teeth and some of the coves here would steal those too.

  I began to trudge back along the track between the huts, my feet squishing in the mud from last night’s storm. Most of the walls were half washed away already, and the cabbage-tree-frond roofs were rotting.

  Bullock Man followed me. Just like I knew he would.

  I’d be safe while the storeman could see me. But I had to turn the corner soon. I knew some tricks that would protect me against coves like this. I’d bitten a man’s leg once when he tried to steal my damper, and poured a shovel full of coals on a man’s head when he grabbed Ma, while Ma was already busy kneeing him in the stomach and squashing his nose with her fist. But this time I was on my own. If I bit Bullock Man, I might startle him enough to let go of me long enough to escape. But I’d have lost my rations.

  I’d have to run as soon as I got to the corner. Fast!

  One! Two! Three! I began to sprint, fast as a rabbit, except there weren’t any in New South Wales. Fast as a lizard, maybe.

  I heard Bullock Man’s feet pound behind me. He was big, but he was fast too. He was nearly onto me! I could smell him, sweat and dirt and rotting teeth. I heard him laugh. And then I heard . . .

  ‘Ow!’

  I glanced back. Bullock Man grabbed his knee in agony. He stared at a rock at his feet.

  Had someone thrown that rock at him?

  No time to find out. I ran.

  CHAPTER 2

  Me and Elsie

  I ran past the huts, all higgledy-piggledy along the shore, then climbed the hill between the cliffs streaked with seagull droppings and onto the beach. You could see the harbour from here, blue and grey, with its green fingers covered in trees. It was empty now, of course, apart from its tiny islands, with no Indian canoes or the big transport ships that had brought us from England. I couldn’t even see the colony’s own two tiny ships. They’d sailed off somewhere. England? Norfolk Island? To get more food? No one told the likes of me.

  We were stranded here, hungry and ragged. Except I’d been hungry and ragged back in England too. At least here I had the harbour and the bright birds — Ma had loved those birds — and no rats trying to bite my face like there’d been back in prison.

  Now I had Elsie too. And today we weren’t even going to be hungry!

  I stopped for breath, enjoying the harbour and the tickle of the breeze, then ran down into the colony’s huts again. That was the trick, see? No place to hide in the bush. Even the trees had tall straight trunks you couldn’t climb unless you were an Indian. But in the straggle of huts up from the beach there was this one shack that had half fallen down. If you pulled a bit of roof aside and squeezed underneath, there was a tiny room, big enough for me and Elsie to sit up or lie down in.

  It wasn’t much. But it was safe. It even kept most of the rain off us. I’d pinched another blanket. I’d pulled up grass and bracken to make a bed too, just like Ma had shown me.

  Elsie stared up at me as I slipped under the roof then carefully pulled it over us, her face small and white in the dimness. She got scared being alone. I grinned and held out the cheese. ‘Got it!’ I whispered.

  Elsie didn’t say anything. Elsie never said anything. Elsie couldn’t talk. Don’t know why. She’d never said a word since I’d found her. Never smiled neither. But she almost smiled then. She gazed at that cheese like it was a chest of treasure.

  I’d have hugged her, but Elsie didn’t like being touched, except when we huddled up for warmth at night. I crouched next to her and broke the cheese in half.

  ‘Don’t eat it too fast,’ I reminded her. Ma taught me that. If you eat too fast when you’re hungry, you vomit it up and then you’re worse off than before.

  I took a nibble of cheese. Oh, it was good. I nibbled again. I tried not to think of the first months in the colony when Ma was alive. I was never hungry then. I had a tent to sleep in, and fire outside, as big as we wanted because the trees here dropped so much dead wood it looked like they grew it just for folks like us to burn.

  The third day after we landed at Sydney Cove was the first time I had enough to eat in my life. Two days of stumbling, feeling the land go up and down like the sea, while all the sheep and cows and pigs stumbled around us. I’d have laughed if I hadn’t felt so dizzy. Then the governor ordered Ma and some other women to gather oysters, down on the harbour rocks . . . and me too.

  Oh, them oysters. Small and sweet and tasting of the sea. I just sat and ate and ate till no more would fit in my stomach while Ma and the others bashed them with rocks, then put the shells in big bags to burn to make the stuff called lime that held the bricks together that were used to build the officers’ chimneys and the governor’s house.

  Day after day we ate those oysters.
Most of the women were assigned to care for the officers, but not Ma and the other oyster-shell gatherers. I grew so fast my trousers almost rode up to my knees. I didn’t care. Ma and I were warm and safe and our bellies were full. After the work bell rang each afternoon Ma and I could do what we wanted, gather wood for the fire, or more bracken for our beds. Every night we sat by the fire and Ma made damper in the ashes — someone called it that because the coals had to be damped down so the outside didn’t burn and waste precious flour — and a stew of peas and salt pork and watercress picked from the stream in our pannikins. Ma held me close and sang me songs, songs I’d never heard before because she’d always been too tired, her belly too empty to have energy for singing.

  We’d had a year here, me and Ma. And then Ma died.

  I ate my last crumb of cheese slowly. I’d sleep with the rest of the rations under my shirt tonight, to keep them from the rats and ants. ‘We can eat the pork tomorrow morning,’ I told Elsie. ‘Then tomorrow night I’ll find a fire to cook some damper.’

  Elsie looked scared again. Scared someone might find her when I wasn’t there. Scared I might not come back too. It was dangerous going out after dark. Some of the convicts had been made nightwatchmen: they bashed you up good if they found you out at night. But I was good at keeping to the shadows. And flour made you sick if you ate it raw. I knew. I’d tried.

  ‘Maybe even find some oysters if I can sneak around to a cove where no one will see me,’ I added. Oysters were free for the gathering, but if the convict foremen saw, they’d put me to work. If I had to work, Elsie’d be alone all day. I patted her hand. She didn’t draw it back any more. She knew I wouldn’t hurt her. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t get caught. I’m the best hider in the colony!’ I boasted. ‘No one can ever find me! I’m —’

  I stopped. I heard voices not far away. Footsteps coming closer. Elsie froze. Had Bullock Man found us?

  I clenched my fists. No one was going to hurt Elsie without a fight.

  Someone scrabbled at the ruins of the hut. I’d been followed all right.