Under Glass by Claire Robertson

Author:Claire Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781415209639
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

9

THEY LEARN THE NAME OF THE COUSIN, the eventual inheriting cousin who will take all they have. Frederick Redmain Chetwyn. Frederick Redmain who will be eighteen soon, and is a midshipman on the Rose of Sharon: does he even know their names? As only an enemy can, his Missenden cousins imagine him unfairly blessed with looks, firm limbs, vigour. They give him, as enemies will, more than a villain’s share of malice, a dissembling, sly nature and super-human endurance for the years-long, perhaps decades-long, inexorable theft of their home.

Sophronia, who is eight years old, anathematises him, bitter as a bishop, and teaches her three small sisters to reserve for their cousin the villain’s part in any play.

The twins intone a pirate’s curse:

‘May sharks who live in the Andaman Sea …’

‘… enjoy their dinner off his bones.’

And they run, whooping, knowing they are safe.

She will have to bear again. There is no way around it. She will have to trust the odds, and believe that the next child – the last child – will be the son the land needs.

As though thinking alone can make it so, she thinks of little else, tensing her neck and imagining that she is willing a male child into her body. In the night when Chetwyn reaches his crisis she thinks that one thought: make me a son. She has read but has never owned the Aristotle, and although she knows there is a rule about which side to turn onto after the business of marriage to guarantee a boy, she cannot recall it and, fearing she will choose the wrong side, lies on her back, listening to him sleep. How can this that ought to be so much in her control be out of her control?

Going about her day in the kitchen or the garden, with her household or her sugar accounting slips or her handsome seed record, ignoring her hoard of gold, she believes she has indeed begun the male child she needs, wherever it is that children begin. Perhaps in her heart, proof of life in her. Perhaps it begins there during the private business and drops to her belly, and there sticks and grows. She imagines a swelling fruit, a drupe, growing around the case of him.

There is a lull in the harvest work. There is cane arrowing in some of the upper lands, the second cycle on the first lands they planted. In the lower fields, and over the hill in Python, the hot sandy soil lies in humped lines, and no shoots show themselves.

A trader in small goods calls at the estate, setting Sophronia and the twins hopping for ribbons, and little Maude struck dumb at the sound of his tiny bells. Mrs Chetwyn comes out to satisfy their cravings, and see about ink and paper and soap and trimmings for herself, and for the other women of the household.

Zodwa and her aunts hang back as the little girls surge about the boxy cart, whose sides lift to make a hanging and a shelved riot of gaudiness.

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