Anne Pelham

Role Memsahib; wife of the Sudder Dewani Adalat judge Nationality British Status alive Age 38

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.

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.

Connections

• Roderick Pelham — her husband
• Harriet Courtney — rival and ally
• Ram Mohan Roy — a name she has heard dismissed
• Havildar Pratap Singh — caught him bribing her bearer at the ball
• Ratan — her palanquin bearer, offered a bribe to abandon his post
• Ashworth Dinner Garden Reach

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.

Chapter 4, Session 10 (9–10 October 1814) — Kali, the ayah, and a bearer’s accusation. In the drawing room she described Kali Puja with open disdain: the black goddess with her tongue out and a necklace of heads, goats cut by the hundred, the northern villages worst for it, Baranagar in particular. Her ayah went to the havildar to ask what family Mrs Ward had served before the Wentworths, and Katherine overheard the question. At the fires, Ratan told Pratap that the Pelhams underpay and burn the villages’ petitions (Ratan and the Spoons). Nobody asked her the newcomer’s question about what the courts see, and the dismissed-complaints window did not open.

Chapter 4, Session 11 (11 October 1814) — the servants’ questions surface. A letter Harriet Courtney sent Meg, shared with the Wentworth sisters on Tuesday morning, revealed that Lady Anne’s servants have been asking pointed questions about the Wentworth sisters’ backgrounds and, specifically, about Katherine Ward’s past employment — her cover now being probed from both above and below stairs.

Appearances

Campaign Log

• Session 12 - The Governor’s Ball — Asked Katherine directly about her background at the ball. Caught Pratap Singh attempting to bribe her palanquin bearer Ratan with fifty rupees, reprimanded him fiercely in perfect Hindi, and threatened to report him to his commanding officer.
• Session 14 - A Morning of Manners and Monstrosities — at the Charitable Ladies’ Committee she set Mrs Ward a chair apart, and Mrs Ward nudged it back into the circle. She examined her on the Cockney, Captain Ward and her previous place, and said she would write to England by the next packet. Privately afterwards she said she did not believe there was ever a Captain Ward, and offered fifty pounds for Surlish’s copies of the petitions his clerk Tibbett made in her husband’s court. She gave Mrs Ward her card: Monday at four.

The Gossip Ledger