Information about the book
Set in Natal in the nineteenth century among the settlers and the homesteaders and the sugar-cane farmers, Claire Robertson’s masterful new novel Under Glass tells the story of Mrs Chetwyn, who arrives in Port Natal from India in 1856. She is with her eldest daughter and her ayah, and has been travelling for eleven months to join her husband, already deep in the hinterland.
Her father-in-law has staked them their passage, a sum for settlement and an arrangement for the purchase of land, but there are conditions to his generosity that will have a lasting effect on the Chetwyns, specially on their fifth child, Cosmo, born years later.
It is on the Chetwyns’ sugar-cane farm that the reader begins to understand that there is something strange about Cosmo, something that must be kept secret or hidden.
At once a deeply researched historical novel and an intriguing mystery, Under Glass is a high-stakes narrative of deception and disguise that will appeal to a range of readers of literary fiction by one of the country’s finest novelists.
EXTRACT
If the haircut delays the mill visit, my first jacket seems to bring on the day (I cannot guess their thinking). I who have reached what they are calling the age of reason come to tea in my jacket and knickerbockers and Father swallows and comes to me and brings a hand to hover about my head. It settles on my shoulder, and he says: ‘Well, my … Cosmo, I’d say tomorrow’s the day! Over the hill with Papa. You shall be the engineer and start us off, and we’ll try out the configuration we have just today set for the works. What do you say?’
The girls are listening. Maude drops her eyes to her book to hide her envy, but I have the attention of the others: the one, granted this – required to do this, in fact, when it is not required of them. They sniff about this new thing like mice. And from Father’s hand on my shoulder to the settling of the visit: Mother watching.
The next day begins with me in my own bed, and breakfast, and then to the parlour, where Latin from a book and sums share our time with games. Today for Pretend I am conscripted for stiff-armed marching and musical shouting. ‘Oh the grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men, he marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.’
Mother and I step in place, bellowing in time. We laugh. Is she tiring me out? Is she testing the limits of my voice’s volume and energy? I know only that I am encouraged to march and shout and after a while, when she has shown me how, I do so. When we are only halfway up, we are neither up nor down.
Soldiers’ games, and, later, the privilege of the mill. I leave Griffin watching from the veranda until we are almost out of sight, Father, Fuze and me, and I dare to turn around and push at the air to tell her to leave me – leave off watching me. She shakes her head but turns away and I, in my triumph, walk on with the men, along the break between the cane, over the hill to Python.
Downhill from us, somewhere in the towering, muttering cane, is our old house, Fuze’s home. Now we know it as ‘the compound’ and are forbidden to go there, and mostly obey; the castle and its gardens, and the closer cane and breaks, are enough for us, with snakes and night leopards for excitement and one another and pilgrims coming up the breaks for company.
On the other side of the hill, when we are undoubtedly on Python, we meet a gang of cutters along the break: naked to the waist, with bright rags on their foreheads, each with the cutlass we call ‘panga’, sometimes two, leaning on his shoulder. They do not break their stride, but close their lines to clear the path for us, and greet Father as ‘nkosi’, dipping their heads towards him but watching Fuze and giving him a share of their tribute.
Fuze speaks to them, an easy greeting, and an enquiry, and we and they slow for their answer. To my astonishment, I see – by his gestures and their turning heads – that he has mentioned me.
We are accustomed to utterly ignoring one another, we children and the cane-cutters. We know ourselves to be nothing but a shameful irritation to them, and when – as has happened only once in my memory – they cut the home stands of cane, moving close to the house in their swaying, flashing squad, we were herded first into the drawing room and then upstairs.
We spied, then, on their fearsome knives and their deep songs – boomed forth, or droned, and sometimes sketched with half-voiced breaths in an absentminded way, a placeholder until one of them reached the end of his line, straightened his back, drew a full breath and gave voice as he clutched for the next stalk and swept down his knife arm.
We know helplessly, that, like a dog to a bird, we do not exist for them until we move, and yet here they are, looking me over, boots to straw hat, which hat I now jam lower on my head. I hear the word ‘umfaan’ rumble among them, and then we are past one another and Father is nodding foolishly and Fuze is leading us down the hill.
In my jacket I am seen as I approach between Father and Fuze. The men busy with the oxen at the crusher grin and turn their heads to watch us approach even as they circle in the great machine, each at the shoulder of an ox. We reach them and stop there, and Fuze speaks to them, about me, in tones that seem to present me as proof of something only presumed.
An older man asks Fuze a question, or a barrage of questions; he speaks as though he has some right of ownership or kinship over me, but his tone brings only mild, formal answers from Fuze, as if to encourage the catechism.
It winds down and with a whoop the old man darts at me, seizes me under the arms and swings me onto the back of one of the three oxen still walking their circle around the crusher. The beast turns its head and shows me a crazed eye and the nearer tip of its horn, but does not baulk at my weight or the great cheer that meets this manoeuvre, and I catch my father’s pleasure in this as I look back at him. I turn my head to watch him in the way that the men watched me, over the shoulder.
I must make two circuits before they will let me down. The ox’s hide prickles like tweed through my breeches and there is no handhold that I can find but the old man’s hand on my back. I am high off the ground and the ox stinks, and there is forbidding heaviness in the poles that lead from the yoke to the gears of the machine, and violence in their ungoverned shifting as they knock against the boss. Shining eyes lift to me, and there is shouting, and in recollection, at least, my pagan soul confirms that here I am, the prince of Missenden.
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by Claire Robertson
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