Ashworth Dinner Invitation Draft

Content

MR CHARLES ASHWORTH requests the honour of the company of

Mr Frederick Cavendish The Viscount de Montferrand Miss Wentworth · Miss Georgiana Wentworth Miss Ward · Cornet Wyndham and Miss Ashby

at DINNER, on Sunday the 9th October, at seven o’clock.

Garden Reach.

An answer is requested.

Context

Delivered to the Cavendish Compound on Saturday evening, within hours of the party coming ashore, by a chuprassy from the Magistrate’s office in a scarlet sash who waits at the gate for an answer and will not come in.

Pratap does not bring the card. He is on the compound when it arrives, and what he does is more useful: he explains it. What hour is meant by seven o’clock (half past six, in practice). What answer is required and in what form. What is worn. Whether one brings anything (one does not). Which of them are expected to walk in to dinner ahead of which others.

None of that is in any book the party owns, and getting it wrong in front of the District Magistrate on their second day would be a real and lasting social cost. He saves them from it in about ninety seconds, pleasantly, without being asked twice.

Clues Embedded

Prop Notes

A stiff card, good quality, written not engraved. The names in a clerk’s careful copperplate with the ranks given properly. “An answer is requested” at the foot in smaller writing. Slightly damp at one corner, because everything is.

Printable prop (preferred): Chapters/Chapter 4 - Calcutta/Props/ashworth-invitation.html — open in a browser, print with Background graphics on, margins None. Text is verbatim from this file; the image prompt below remains as an alternative.

Atomic image prompt

Create an image. Canticle of the End: Regency era, 1814-15. Palette of deep amber, tarnished gold, bone white and shadow black. Period light sources only, warm lamplight. No modern elements. Aged paper with iron gall ink in a careful clerk's copperplate, no crest and no engraving, faint foxing at one corner. The horror is implication and absence, wrongness in a detail noticed second. Nothing overt.

A stiff cream invitation card of 1814 lying on a dark polished wood table, photographed from above at a slight angle. Handwritten throughout in brown iron-gall ink in a formal clerk's copperplate, centred, with a list of six or seven names in the middle set slightly larger, and one final name below them set in a smaller italic hand as though added afterwards. A short line of much smaller writing at the very foot. No crest, no printed border, no decoration of any kind. One corner faintly water-stained and cockled. Warm lamplight from the left, the card the brightest thing in frame.

Relationships

• Created Charles Ashworth — The welcome dinner invitation, extended as routine courtesy
• Concerns Havildar Pratap Singh — Same office, same clerk's hand as his assignment letter