Description

Forty-eight. Came out at twenty and never went back. Firm opinions on everything and slightly terrifying with it. Runs the Charitable Ladies’ Committee that funds the orphanage, and runs it properly.

She acts as hostess at Ashworth’s table, and has for eight years, since he was widowed. Both of them treat this as entirely unremarkable and it is the nearest thing to intimacy either permits themselves.

Background

Twenty-eight years in Bengal. She has buried friends, friends’ children and two of her own, and she has stayed. She knows every scandal in the settlement for thirty years and deploys almost none of it.

Motivations

Order. The settlement running as it should, the committees funded, the newcomers placed correctly. She is not unkind. She is simply certain.

What Meg Says

Harriet Courtney knows every scandal for thirty years and she is too polite to use one of them. Which is worse, in a way, than if she weren’t.

Hook

She is the party’s first serious social test. In the churchyard and again at dinner she wants to place them: family, connections, why Bengal, how long. She is not suspicious and she is very hard to be vague at, because twenty-eight years of practice has made her genuinely, warmly relentless.

She has also heard, at second and third hand, complaints about missing persons in the district dismissed as native superstition. She does not connect them to anything.

Connections

• Edmund Courtney — her husband
• Charles Ashworth — she keeps his table
• Anne Pelham — a rival and an ally
• Scene 06 Ashworth Dinner
• Scene 05 St Johns

In Play

Chapter 4, Session 9 (9 October 1814) — she ran both rooms. She followed Charles Ashworth through the churchyard hour at St John’s and catalogued the party’s fashions and social standing with the practised eye of a woman who has organised Calcutta’s social scene for most of thirty years.

At Garden Reach she took charge of the introductions and the pairings, ensuring every guest went in by strict rank. She put Thomas Wyndham in with her protégée Arabella Fitch rather than with Emma, and he was visibly displeased about it.

Her memory of the vanished family enquirers, nine years ago, has not come up. Still available.

Appearances

Relationships

• Married to Edmund Courtney — Twenty-eight years in Bengal together
• Knows Charles Ashworth — Acts as hostess at his table since his widowing in 1806