Birrung the Secret Friend by Jackie French Page B

for?’
    â€˜In case the Indian hurt you,’ I said.
    Mr Johnson smiled and shook his head. ‘They were fishing spears, not fighting spears.’
    I hadn’t even known that there were different types. ‘What did he want?’
    â€˜Abaroo,’ said Mr Johnson.
    I felt anger sweep up from my toes. The black man had seen how pretty she was. He wanted Birrung to be his wife . . .
    â€˜He is her brother,’ said Mr Johnson quietly. ‘Abaroo wanted to go with him, to live with her father, Maugoran, or with Barangaroo, the wife of Bennelong. I told her she must stay here. We must try to teach her to be civilised, to know God . . .’
    To help Mrs Johnson if she gets sick, I thought. Sometimes women did get sick afterwards, even if they didn’t die when they had the baby. Childbirth fever, they called it. That’s what had killed lots of the women who had babies back in gaol. But maybe Birrung knew how to make that better too . . .
    â€˜I didn’t know she had any family,’ I said. ‘I thought they all died in the plague.’ It felt funny, to think that all along she’d had family. I’d thought she was an orphan like me.
    â€˜They left her to die when she was sick! We are her family now. She must stay here,’ said Mr Johnson. He hesitated. ‘The governor wishes her to stay too. Barney, perhaps I shouldn’t tell a child this . . .’
    A child, I thought. I’m ten years old! I’ve sailed across the world! And stayed alive in Newgate Prison, which was harder.
    â€˜There’ve been more attacks by the natives. Even people killed. The natives have been sadly provoked,I know, but . . . well, the governor hopes Abaroo, like Bennelong and little Nanberry, might be an ambassador to their people. Teach them to like us . . .’
    By keeping Birrung away from her pa and brother? I thought. By keeping Bennelong prisoner? It was a funny way to make friends.
    â€˜And to know the ways of God,’ finished Mr Johnson.
    I looked down as Elsie’s hand took the frying pan from mine. Back in the lean-to I could hear Birrung sobbing.

CHAPTER 10
Birrung Stays
    April 1790
    Birrung didn’t go. It would have been easy to leave us, to leave our house, to leave the colony. The colony was a prison without any walls. Any of the convicts could have wandered off, except they’d starve, or be killed by the natives.
    Birrung could have gone back to her family. She could have fished in a canoe with Barangaroo, swum every day instead of working in the garden. But she stayed with us.
    The melons ripened, and more corn. We spent night after night shucking the paper husks off and cutting the kernels from the cobs, to make the crop smaller to store, me and the Johnsons and Birrung and Sally and Elsie sitting in the firelight, and baby Milbah sleeping in the cradle made from a sea chest.
    When Milbah wasn’t sleeping, she made a lot of noise, crying or laughing, and made messes in the napkins Sally had to wash. But her face wasn’t red now — it was pink and white — and she even had a tiny curl of hair at the front. Sometimes Mrs Johnson let me hold her. She squirmed a lot, but she felt sort of nice too.
    We hung the bags of corn on ropes in the shed, with sharp rounds of metal halfway down to stop the rats running up the walls and down the rope and eating all our harvest.
    There were bags of dried beans and dried peas, and pumpkins and marrows left in the sun till their skins hardened so they didn’t rot during the winter. Sally boiled some of the watermelons, then strained the juice till it was a sweet clear syrup, and poured it into tightly corked old wine bottles, to sweeten our puddings in the year to come. There was no sugar left in the colony now, not even treacle or molasses. Birrung hadn’t brought usany honey for months — she didn’t go off by herself to forage now. I wondered if