The Secret of the Black Bushranger by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Lashed!

1794

The new year came like new years always seemed to do there, with storms and lightning ripping the sky. But the rain was good for the crops and for our garden, even if it drenched Mr Johnson as he walked wearily the fourteen miles to and from Rose Hill each week.

Month after month went by. Elsie and I spread out grapes to dry for puddings and for hearth cakes. She made cheeses too, better even than Sally’s. Elsie liked making things taste good, while the convict woman had done it as a duty. A grand bean crop — we dried nearly all of it to use in winter — and enough potatoes and corn too so there was some to sell, as well as give away. Mr Johnson even paid me wages, in coins from many lands — all the places that the officers traded for cargoes of rum and other goods — for the colony didn’t have its own money, nor had we enough English coins.

Autumn came, not like the autumn back in England, with its dappled leaves — except on our fruit trees — but shorter days, the pumpkins and the melons ripening. Then winter, shorter days still, and the hens stopped laying, but still so warm that Elsie picked rhubarb for puddings and hard brown pears and the pale green apples that tasted best after they’d been stored for a few months, like quinces.

With all our work, we did not even know Black Caesar had escaped again till the knock came at the door, from one of the Second Fleet convicts who had helped build the church. He stood in the wind, holding his cabbage-tree hat on with both hands. ‘It’s Black Caesar, sir! He needs you!’

‘Come in out of the weather, man. Edgar Applecorn, isn’t it?’ Mr Johnson held open the door. Mrs Johnson poured him a cup of sarsaparilla tea and Elsie ran for a plate of apple fritters. Mr Johnson shut the door against the cold south wind.

‘It’s Black Caesar, sir,’ Edgar Applecorn said again. ‘He ran off, but they’ve caught him. He needs you now, sir.’

‘I didn’t know he was gone,’ said Mr Johnson quietly. Once one of the officers like Mr Dawes would have told Mr Johnson all the news. But not these days. Even those officers who still came to church were careful not to seem too friendly with us, for fear of angering Major Grose or Captain Macarthur or the others in the Rum Corps. Nor did Mr Johnson make it easy for those who might be his friends. He used his sermons to denounce the trade in rum and the loss of every vestige of morality in the colony.

‘Black Caesar went bush again, stealing from the farms. He had a gang with him this time. He’s going to get a hundred and fifty lashes this morning.’

One hundred and fifty! It was enough to kill a man. ‘All at the same time?’ I asked. Sometimes a man might be given ten or twenty lashes a week, so he could recover between whippings.

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