The Secret of the Black Bushranger Read online

Mr Johnson smiled at him. ‘The only riches I want are in the House of the Lord,’ he said. ‘But I thank you. I have thought of a solution perhaps. One where you need not be chained once you recover.’

  John Black looked eager. I gazed at Mr Johnson. Was he going to suggest that John Black come and live with us?

  ‘I shall ask Governor Phillip if you may go on the Supply to Norfolk Island,’ Mr Johnson said slowly. ‘The governor will know you can’t escape from an island, not without a ship to take you. They need hard workers on Norfolk Island. Show yourself trustworthy and you will have land of your own there, and animals, even one day a wife and family. It is good land there, they say,’ he added. ‘Green and fertile, like England.’

  John Black looked at Mr Johnson warily. ‘And they will not chain me?’

  ‘If you give me your word you will not try to escape from this hospital, nor into the woods from the colony, I will ask that they not chain you, nor whip you either for escaping.’

  ‘I give you my word, sir. I will go to this island. And I will not try to escape from this hospital.’ John Black held out his hand.

  Mr Johnson shook it, then stood up. ‘I will come and pray with you this afternoon, when I bring the soup.’

  ‘Bless you, sir,’ said John Black. He lay down on his bed again. Even talking had tired him.

  Mr Johnson and I walked back up to our house. ‘Sir, do you believe him?’

  ‘About what, Barney?’

  ‘About trying to herd the cows back to the colony. And not escaping or stealing.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘But I do know that God forgives all sins, if we repent. And I think that John Black will do better on Norfolk Island.’ He smiled at me. ‘And the colony may well do better with John Black on Norfolk Island, where he can’t escape and there are no Indians for him to fight with and dream of leading.’

  I nodded. ‘Mr Johnson, I’ve been thinking . . .’

  ‘A useful practice,’ said Mr Johnson drily.

  ‘Why is slavery so bad? John Black ain’t . . . hasn’t . . . been treated worse than my ma was.’ If he’d been hungry, why, so was most of the country, including me and Ma.

  ‘But one day your mother would have been free, when she’d served her sentence. She could have married again, to whomever she chose. And she knew that her son was free. The son of a slave is a slave too.’

  Mr Johnson looked at me seriously. He was good like that. Most grown-ups gave you a clip on the ear if you asked too many questions. But Mr Johnson liked them.

  ‘It’s not simple, Barney. Slaves in the Americas can become free, if they have skills they use to earn extra jobs to buy their freedom — and a master who will allow that. Often a man may free his favourite slaves in his will. And in the Americas you’ll find men and women who argue that a slave has more security than a free man, for in a good home slaves are cared for as they age. But if slaves have a bad master, things can be very bad indeed.’

  ‘But that’s the same with any master, sir. Back in England a master can whip his servant, or let them go with no reference so no one will hire them, and they starve.’ I met his eyes. ‘Do more slaves die than poor people in London town?’

  ‘I don’t know, Barney,’ said Mr Johnson softly. ‘Perhaps the life of a slave is better than that of the English poor, for the slavemaster will not want to risk his investment, not while his slaves are still young enough to work. But I believe the worst of slavery is . . .’ He hesitated.

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘The slow corruption of the soul of anyone who believes he owns another man, or child or woman. The slow starvation of the soul of a slave, who knows they cannot choose what is good or bad, but must do what their masters say, because they are owned, not hired. We belong to ourselves, and to God, and while we must do the bidding of our masters, we cannot be owned.’

  I wasn’t sure I understood that. I wasn’t sure what I thought of John Black either.

  But then a flock of red and green birds flew down, yelling at us. I wondered instead what people got to eat for dinner on their birthdays. I reckoned it would be something good. And after dinner Elsie and I could go and pick the best grass we could find to feed my lamb. ‘I’m going to call her Georgina,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ asked Mr Johnson, startled by the change in subject.

  ‘My lamb. It would be George, for the king, but she’s a girl, so it’s Georgina, and she’ll be queen of my flock of sheep.’

  Mr Johnson laughed. ‘A good plan, Barney. A very good plan indeed.’

  CHAPTER 7

  To Norfolk Island

  March 1790–March 1793

  A month or so later Birrung and Elsie and I went down to the harbour to watch the little Supply sail for Norfolk Island, with John Black aboard it. It was March, but still so hot that as we walked home Birrung flung off her dress again and plunged into the waves in her petticoat — Mrs Johnson had finally convinced her that she had to wear clothes all the time, even in the sea — and there was no keeping Birrung from the sea. I took off my shirt and followed her, wearing my trousers. Elsie hesitated, then shrugged off her dress too. She looked even more like a skinned rabbit in a wet petticoat.

  But it was cool in the waves, and fun. Birrung showed us how to float, then to wave our hands and legs to swim in the water, and how to duck under the water to find shellfish.

  I took to going swimming every day after work, to wash off the dirt and to cool down. It probably saved my life, knowing how to swim, when I went whaling the next year.

  So much happened that year. Good things like I grew a whole foot taller and needed new trousers, and Mrs Johnson had baby Milbah. And other things happened that were so hard to bear I found myself crying in the night, sometimes, there in my storeroom.

  Because the next fleet came. And even if that meant England hadn’t forgotten us, and had sent us more food and tools and medicines, these were death ships filled with the dead and the living locked up together in the holds, and Mr Johnson was the only man in the whole colony who had the courage to go down into those ships to bring up the survivors.

  I still have nightmares about those people, white faces and stick arms, staggering about the colony like the dead had come to life. And they were the lucky ones.

  But the worst thing that happened that year was that Birrung left us to go back to her brother and her family. I reckoned she had stayed with us just to see Mrs Johnson’s baby born safely, because Mr and Mrs Johnson had looked after her when she was sick with the plague.

  It was hard in those months after Birrung left. I kept hoping to see her come back, striding up the track to the house or slipping through the trees. I missed her smile and her laughter. I’d loved her. Nowadays I know there are many different kinds of love, but back then I hadn’t had many people to love, just Ma, then Elsie and Mr and Mrs Johnson and Birrung. And Birrung was the most beautiful, laughing-est girl I had ever seen.

  In 1791 I went whaling, hoping to make my fortune (I didn’t), and Elsie might have spoken to me but, if she had, she didn’t do it again. And we had so many cucumbers that it was hard to even give them away — the only way to store cucumber was with jars and vinegar, and we didn’t have enough of either in the colony then — and a dingo got one of our best roosters, and I tried not to show how much I missed Birrung, especially when Elsie was around, because for some reason she got snarky when I talked about Birrung to her.

  So much happened that I sort of forgot about John Black, till Mr Johnson came back from his visit to Norfolk Island. He returned on the Queen, just before Christmas, browner than ever from being on board ship and glad of Sally’s roast roosters and gravy and corn puddings after the food he’d endured.

  ‘And how is poor Mr Black?’ asked Mrs Johnson as we ate our pease pudding — Sally had been saving our salt pork ration for weeks to make Mr Johnson what she called ‘a taste of home’ to go with the roast roosters and vegetables, though I liked fresh peas and boiled potatoes and a good hunk of r
oast kangaroo or fish better than dried peas sour with weevils and meat so hard you had to chew it a hundred times to swallow it.

  Mr Johnson laughed. ‘“Poor Mr Black” has the whole island wrapped around his little finger. Even Major Ross speaks well of him — the first time I have heard the major speak well of any man. He does the work of ten and charms the seagulls off the trees with his jokes. Nor is he starved at Norfolk Island — they have food enough even for him. He has a plot of land to work, and three days a week free to work it. He has a wife now too: one of the convicts from the Lady Juliana — I married them myself. He has even been given a pig.’

  ‘A pig!’ Pigs were scarce back then in the colony and on Norfolk Island too. They must really admire John Black to give him a pig.

  And then we talked of other things, like was Milbah teething again, and how old Scruggins and I had another field cleared to plant more corn, and collected sheep dung to spread on it, and the baptisms and other marriages Mr Johnson had performed at Norfolk Island.

  A lot happened the next year too. I grew even more. Mr Johnson’s Henry was born — I’d hoped Birrung might come back to help again, but she didn’t. Mrs Johnson recovered well, though, and Henry thrived.

  My sheep Georgina had two more lambs, both ewes, and I knew enough figuring now to work out that I might have a flock of twenty sheep in three years’ time at that rate, even if some of them only had one lamb, and some were rams.

  Governor Phillip left the colony too — he never had recovered from the spear wound left in his shoulder by the Indian Wil-ee-ma-rin.

  But Mr Johnson heard all the news about John Black in letters from Norfolk Island. No one could ignore John Black! He had built himself a hut — the trees there were better timber than our cabbage-tree trunks that rotted the winter after they’d been cut down, for all they looked so strong and straight. He was given the use of an ox to plough with and his sow had piglets.

  I felt a bit jealous about those piglets. Pigs have seven babies or more at a time, and sheep only one or two. John Black would have more pigs than I had sheep, and a pig was worth more than a sheep, if you knew how to smoke it for hams and bacon. But once you’d eaten the pig it was gone. My sheep would keep giving wool as long as they lived.

  And then came the news that John Black had a daughter too. It seemed like Mr Johnson’s prayers for John Black had all come true. A farm, a family, a life without chains — of course he still had to work on government projects two days a week, not just on his farm. But that didn’t seem much to give for a new life on a green island.

  I was glad. I knew Mr Johnson fretted about whether he had done the right thing in helping John Black the night he had escaped, or if he could have given more comfort to a man who had been a slave. Mr Johnson didn’t need worries about John Black added to all he had to face now.

  For things were hard for Mr Johnson in those days. With Governor Phillip gone, Major Grose was in charge of the whole colony. Major Grose was one of the Rum Corps officers who sold the convicts’ rations to make money while the convicts starved, who brought in cargoes of rum that no one else was allowed to sell, so the officers alone could make their fortunes, and granted themselves big farms — all of which Mr Johnson said was against the laws of both man and God.

  The Rum Corps officers didn’t like Mr Johnson much, not when he was the one man who spoke out against them, about the evil of drunkenness that had invaded the colony, and the laws the officers broke granting themselves great estates and plenty of convicts to work them.

  So Major Grose tried to take his revenge. He ordered that Mr Johnson could only give his church services at six in the morning — before it was even light in winter, out there in the cold wind from the harbour. He wouldn’t let Mr Johnson go down to Rose Hill by boat either, so Mr Johnson had to walk, a long and weary seven miles each way. Mrs Johnson did a lot of praying in those days, to keep her husband safe and strong enough to keep on going.

  But Mr Johnson would not give in. If Major Grose would give him no convicts to build his church, then he’d build it with his own hands, just as he had the first house we lived in.

  So we did, me and Mr Johnson and some of the convicts who knew they owed this good man their lives, working after the ‘end of work’ bell went, not because they had to but because this would be a house of God, and a school too, where they could learn to read and figure, and maybe just because they loved Mr and Mrs Johnson too.

  It was late one March afternoon and the southerly was blowing. We’d got eight big tree trunks in the ground, and the front and back roof frames up too. But though we hauled upon the ropes and pulleys, the big central roof beam was just too heavy for us to lift and keep steady. It kept wobbling in the ropes — and a wobbling roof beam is a dangerous thing.

  Suddenly there was a deep, rolling laugh behind me. ‘You leave that to me, boy!’ And there he was, John Black, just as big as I remembered him or even bigger, with a red handkerchief around his neck.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.

  John Black grinned like he was king of the colony. ‘Going to save your noggin, boy. Come on!’ he yelled to the convict team. ‘Lower that beam down.’

  They did exactly what he ordered them to, then stood around waiting like John Black was their overseer. And he looked like one too, his shirt neatly mended — he was even wearing boots. Where had a convict got boots?

  John Black waited till everyone was watching. Then he took one end of the beam and kneeled by it. Then, slowly, steadily, he heaved it up all by himself till he held it at waist height. I stared, and so did everyone else. How could one man be so strong?

  ‘Now you bring the ladder over here, boy,’ John Black said to me.

  I did what he told me to, though I didn’t like being called boy. I was a free man — well, lad, at any rate. And I’d been in charge of building that day, with Mr Johnson down at Rose Hill. I might not have been as big as John Black, but I was almost as tall as Mr Johnson now, with three years’ more muscles from farm work and building than when the convict had last seen me.

  John Black climbed that ladder step by step, still holding that giant pole. Then he lifted it high above his head and held it up to the frame.

  By then I’d guessed what he was going to do. I was ready for him, with straps of leather soaked in water overnight. I clambered up the other side of the ladder and tied the leather straps in place to keep the roof beam tight. They’d dry and shrink in the next few days, keeping the beam even steadier. And by the time the straps rotted away we’d have the roof well braced and firm without them.

  We did the same with the other end, then stood back to admire the work. It suddenly looked like the frame of a church now, not just eight poles in the ground.

  Something hit my back. I turned as it slid off — a big glop of horse manure. ‘Hey, God-boy!’ called a convict with three yellow teeth and eyes almost the same colour.

  ‘Gob-boy, more like!’ yelled his companion. He picked up a stone and aimed it . . . then screamed as John Black grabbed his arm. John Black forced it down until the man dropped the stone, then he shrieked even louder as John Black pulled his arm up behind his back then sharply up again. He sobbed as the big man let it go.

  A small crowd had gathered, muttering, but not too loud in case John Black heard what they said. The convicts who’d been building the church with me had melted away. I couldn’t blame them.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ asked John Black quietly, to me and to the watching crowd.

  I looked at the crowd nervously. ‘Mr Johnson is trying to build a church. But Major Grose and some of the other officers pay men to pelt Mr Johnson and anyone who works here with muck. Or stones.’

  Two years before Mr Johnson had been the best-loved man in the whole colony, the one who had saved the wretches of the Second Fleet, given food from his own garden to the sick, comforted the dying, taught anyone who wanted it to read. But many more convicts had arrived since then. The newcomers didn’t kno
w what Mr Johnson had done: just that they’d get a nip of rum, or more, from the officers if they made fun of him, or any of us who lived in his household or tried to build his church.

  ‘Not while I’m in this colony,’ said John Black softly. He didn’t have to say it loudly. Every man in that crowd was staring at him, even the convict with the hurt arm, who was still crying with pain. They had all seen John Black lift that pole and twist that arm. And he was twice as tall as the biggest of them.

  ‘No one is to hurt Mr Johnson or those who do his work. You hear me? Mr Johnson is a good man.’ John Black’s deep voice grew louder.

  I froze. Was John Black going to say why Mr Johnson was a good man — that he’d sheltered John Black the night he escaped from Garden Island?

  Because if Major Grose heard that, it would give him an excuse to arrest Mr Johnson, and me too. And it wouldn’t even have been an excuse, because we had broken the law that night, both of us, in not telling the governor that John Black was at our house and in letting him go free.

  But John Black said no more. Men muttered. The crowd began to break up. I looked at the frame of our church, so carefully erected. Would someone knock it down that night?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said John Black. ‘I’ve got friends and they’ve got friends. They’ll keep Mr Johnson’s church safe.’ He looked around. ‘He anywhere about today?’

  ‘He’s at Rose Hill,’ I said quickly. Which he was. But I didn’t want John Black coming up to the house either. Things were bad enough for Mr Johnson now without John Black complicating them.

  Suddenly I remembered my dinner, still hanging from a tree branch. I untied the dishcloth and held it out to John Black. It was a huge pasty, filled with vegetables and bits of boiled kangaroo. John Black considered it, then broke off a large hunk and handed the last little bit to me. He grinned again. ‘I reckon five of you would make one of me, so you get one-fifth of this.’

  Actually as it was mine I should have had it all. But then I’d given the pasty to him, so it was also generous of him to give some back. I munched mine, while he swallowed his in six big bites.