Chapter 04 Session 09 Wrap Up
Narrative Recap
The morning after their arrival in Calcutta, the party attended Sunday services at St. John’s Church, where the rigid social hierarchy of the city made itself immediately apparent. The congregation was seated strictly by rank, with Magistrate Charles Ashworth and the senior families occupying the front pews, while the party sat in the middle alongside their hosts, Hugh and Meg Cavendish. Outside, Havildar Pratap Singh waited with the carriages and other non-Christian servants, where he was approached by Ratan, a palanquin bearer for the Pelhams, who complained about his wages and asked about job openings with the East India Company. Pratap rebuffed him flatly, noting that the Company paid its soldiers three times what any local prince’s army could offer — and that was precisely how they had taken over India.
When the service concluded and the congregation spilled into the churchyard for the customary hour of social mingling, the party was immediately swept up in a succession of introductions. Magistrate Ashworth appeared first, unhurried and precise, greeting each of them by name before moving on with the clockwork efficiency of a man who owned the city — because he essentially did. Close behind him came Harriet Courtney, a firm-jawed woman of nearly thirty years in Bengal, who catalogued the party’s fashions and social standing with the practiced eye of someone who had been organizing Calcutta’s social scene since before most of them were adults. Lady Anne Pelham followed, bombarding them with rapid-fire questions about London and Paris before sweeping off, leaving the distinct impression that she had already extracted everything she needed. A young, freckled Scotsman named Alastair Glenny hovered awkwardly around Emma Wentworth without quite managing to say anything useful, while the boisterous Captain Drury shook hands and laughed his way across the yard before being absorbed into another conversation entirely.
Freddy Cavendish used the churchyard hour to intercept the merchant Hawthorne Surlish, the man currently putting a financial squeeze on Hugh’s opium trade by controlling the warehouse rents on the Strand. Freddy’s aristocratic rank made it socially impossible for Surlish to ignore him, and so the merchant stopped, offered a cold handshake, and sneered. He was openly smug about the freedoms granted to independent merchants by the new Charter Act of 1813, and when Freddy probed for vulnerabilities, Surlish simply suggested he start his audit with his own cousin before turning and frog-marching his young wife Sophia away. Sophia had barely managed a smile before her husband silenced her, and the party noted the way she chafed under his control with quiet, visible frustration.
Back at the Cavendish compound on Chowringhee Road, the afternoon was spent gathering intelligence and preparing for the evening ahead. Elizabeth Ashby confided her anxiety about reuniting with the family she had been separated from for fifteen years, asking for company when she eventually visited Blacktown. Meg Cavendish pulled Katherine Ward aside to explain the true power dynamics of Calcutta society, identifying Ashworth as the cleverest man in the city but Anne Pelham as the cleverest person by a wide margin, noting that Roderick Pelham hadn’t had an original opinion since his posting in Madras and that his wife effectively handed down half the city’s judicial verdicts from her own dinner table. Meanwhile, Freddy commissioned Pratap Singh to locate a military engineer named Major Renwick and to take the measure of Surlish’s business dealings. The party also reviewed their gathered notes on the Mandir Mahakali temple at Baranagar Ghat, the upcoming Kali Puja ritual on October 25th, and the name of the temple’s leader — Acharya Devendra Ghosh.
Pratap Singh made his way south across the Maidan to Fort William, the massive star-shaped fortification that was currently buzzing with activity as troops staged for the upcoming invasion of Nepal. Using his rank as a Havildar, he moved through the fort without question and cross-referenced the military records in the Engineers Park. He discovered that Major Renwick was stationed eight miles north of Calcutta at Baranagar, overseeing an embankment project on the Hooghly River, and that his window of availability was narrow — once the embankment was complete, he would almost certainly be reassigned to the front lines of the Gurkha campaign. Pratap returned to relay his findings, and the party noted with unease that Baranagar — the location of both Renwick’s post and the Mandir Mahakali temple — was the same village.
As evening approached, Pratap Singh organized the party’s formal introduction for the magistrate’s dinner, correctly determining that the procession into dinner would be ordered by social rank rather than military or business standing. He briefed each member of the party on their likely position in the order, sparing them the social awkwardness of shuffling around in front of Calcutta’s elite. The party then traveled by carriage through the grand, stucco-lined streets of White Town, past Government House and the Writers’ Building, before arriving at Ashworth’s ostentatious estate at the Garden Reach, where the open-air dining room looked out over a garden that stretched all the way down to the Hooghly River. Among the other carriages waiting outside, they noticed one drawn by zebras.
The cocktail hour in the drawing room brought the full cast of Calcutta society together. Diana Lockhart, a widow who had chosen to remain in India after her husband’s death, immediately gravitated toward the women of the party with the professional courtesy of someone who recognized kindred spirits. Captain Marcus Hale stood alone near the drinks, working through them at a grim and steady pace, while Percy Cartwright arrived already half-drunk and announced with no apparent embarrassment that Surlish had not wished to attend and had sent him instead — a calculated snub that silenced the room. Harriet Courtney organized the procession into dinner with quiet efficiency, pairing each guest by rank, though Thomas Wyndham was visibly displeased to find himself escorting Arabella Fitch — Harriet Courtney’s seemingly airheaded protégé — rather than Emma.
At the dinner table, conversation ranged from the political fallout of the new Charter Act to the fashions of Paris, with Edmund Courtney declaring the loss of the East India Company’s trade monopoly to be doom for all of them and Percy Cartwright drunkenly cheering the new freedoms from the other end of the table. Emma Wentworth saved her sister Georgiana from a quiet social catastrophe by reframing her gloved hands as a bold new fashion statement, turning what might have been a scandal into a trend. Freddy worked on Percy Cartwright with careful patience, planting the idea that the man could run his own warehouse with proper funding rather than continuing to serve a master who treated him worse than his dog. Katherine Ward found herself seated between the grim Captain Hale and the drunk Cartwright, with Diana Lockhart across from her offering dry commentary on the peacocking of men.
The most significant revelation of the evening came from the host himself. Magistrate Ashworth, in conversation with Adrien De Montferand about the French colony of Chandannagar upriver, invited Adrien to assist with the repatriation of the settlement and suggested he break the journey by staying with a personal friend in Baranagar — a charitable and hospitable gentleman named Devendra Ghosh, whom Ashworth described as one of the finest men he knew. The party’s notes named Ghosh as the head of the Mandir Mahakali temple and the likely architect of the Kali Puja ritual they had come to stop. The dinner continued into the night, the punkahs swaying overhead and the Hooghly rushing past in the dark, while the full weight of what they had learned settled quietly over the table.
Events of the Ninth of October
- St Johns Churchyard Hour — the introductions, and the first meeting with Surlish
- Renwick Located at Baranagar — Pratap Singh finds the engineer
- Ashworth Dinner Garden Reach — the Magistrate’s table, and the name he gave away