Description

Thirty-eight. Sharp, bored, and managing a husband and a career at once. Throws excellent suppers. Collects watercolours of Indian birds, which is the one genuine passion she permits herself.

She is the single most valuable guest at Ashworth’s table and nobody at it will realise that tonight.

Background

Twelve years in Bengal. She hears everything that passes through judicial circles, because it is discussed at her own dining table by men who do not notice her listening.

She has heard suppressed complaints dismissed over her own soup: missing persons in the districts, temple disputes, petitions from families nobody intends to help. She remembers them the way one remembers dull anecdotes, which is to say completely and without weight.

Motivations

To be first with information, and to be seen to be first. She trades gossip the way merchants trade cotton, and she is very good at it.

What Meg Says

Anne Pelham hears everything in judicial circles. If you want to know about a complaint that went nowhere, she heard it dismissed at her own table and thought it was boring.

Hook

She is a documentary source who does not know she is one. She will trade what she has heard for what the party can tell her about themselves, which is a real and interesting cost: intelligence for exposure.

What she can give, if asked the right question in the right register: that complaints about disappearances near the northern villages have come up more than once, that her husband thought them beneath the court’s notice, and roughly when. She has no idea this matters.

Connections

• Roderick Pelham — her husband
• Harriet Courtney — rival and ally
• Ram Mohan Roy — a name she has heard dismissed
• Scene 06 Ashworth Dinner
• Scene 05 St Johns

In Play

Chapter 4, Session 9 (9 October 1814) — met, and correctly identified. She approached the party in the churchyard at St John’s, fired rapid questions about London and Paris fashions, and swept off having taken what she came for.

That afternoon Meg named her to Katherine as the cleverest person in Calcutta, and explained that she hears the city’s complaints at her own dinner table and that half its judicial verdicts are settled there. The party now knows where the temple complaints died, and who killed them.

She attended the Magistrate’s dinner. She has not yet mentioned the Baron, and Beat 2 has not fired. The burned box remains unspoken; Ratan has not yet told it to any fire.

Appearances

The Gossip Ledger

Relationships

• Married to Roderick Pelham — She manages him socially and professionally
• Knows Ram Mohan Roy — Has heard his complaints dismissed at her own table