Harriet Courtney

Role Memsahib; chairs the Charitable Ladies' Committee Nationality British Status alive Age 48

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.

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.

Connections

• Edmund Courtney — her husband
• Charles Ashworth — she keeps his table
• Anne Pelham — a rival and an ally
• Ashworth Dinner Garden Reach

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.

Chapter 4, Session 10 (9–10 October 1814) — the subscription lists, and the hunt named twice. In the drawing room she took charge of the ladies at once, promising to put the party’s names down for the Chowringhee Theatre and the subscription concerts at the Town Hall. At the carriages she reminded the party of Saturday’s hunt as a settled fact. Diana said the thing about her and the Magistrate aloud in her own drawing room, to the newcomers, and the party now holds that gossip. The enquirer anecdote was never triggered and did not fire.

Chapter 4, Session 11 (11 October 1814) — sherbet, old grief, and a name from nine years ago. She received Emma and Georgiana in her upstairs sitting room, surrounded by Madras furniture, committee minute books, and mourning pictures of her two deceased sons, and served them sherbet and thin biscuits. She recalled a young, anxious man named Harry Ord, of the Ord family, who came around nine years ago asking questions about his family’s agent and was never seen at a social event again. She did not recognise the other family names the sisters raised, but suggested checking the registers at Chandpal Ghat, and noted that if they wanted to see revenue records, their auditor friend Freddy had every right to demand them. She described Baijnath Mullick as a flamboyant but well-respected merchant and a close confidant of Mr Ashworth.

Appearances

Campaign Log

• Session 14 - A Morning of Manners and Monstrosities — chaired the Charitable Ladies’ Committee in her upstairs sitting room while Lady Anne examined Mrs Ward.