Ashworth Dinner Garden Reach

Summary

On the evening of Sunday 9 October 1814, sixteen days before Kali Puja, Magistrate Charles Ashworth hosted the newly arrived party at his estate at Garden Reach. Over the course of the evening the most credible Englishman in Bengal described Acharya Devendra Ghosh — the head of the Mandir Mahakali temple and the architect of the ritual the party crossed the world to stop — as a charitable and hospitable gentleman, one of the finest men he knows, and offered Adrien de Montferrand a bed at his house.

The dinner was interrupted mid-service at the end of Session 9 and concluded in Session 10 (The Third Course). The third course and the withdrawal are recorded below.

Context

The invitation arrived during the party’s first dinner at the Cavendish Compound on 8 October. By the time the carriages reached Garden Reach the party held the ritual date, the temple’s name, and Ghosh’s name, all derived by Georgiana Wentworth overnight — and had no idea that the man they were hunting was their host’s personal friend.

What Happened

• The procession. Havildar Pratap Singh briefed the party on the order of precedence before they left Chowringhee, sparing them the shuffle in front of Calcutta’s elite: Adrien first, then Freddy, then the Wentworth sisters, with Meg and Elizabeth Ashby as the social wild cards. At the house itself Harriet Courtney took charge of the pairings, and Thomas Wyndham found himself escorting Arabella Fitch rather than Emma.
• The snub. Percy Cartwright arrived alone and already drunk, and announced without embarrassment that Hawthorne Surlish had not wished to attend and had sent him instead. The room went quiet.
• The gloves. Georgiana’s gloved hands at table came within a breath of a scandal. Emma named them a bold new fashion, and the table took it as one.
• The Charter Act. Edmund Courtney called the loss of the Company’s trade monopoly doom for all of them; Cartwright cheered the new freedoms from the far end of the table. Ashworth told Freddy that the sovereignty clause troubles him more than the trade clauses do.
• Cartwright worked. Freddy planted the idea that a man with proper funding could run his own godown rather than serve a master who treats him worse than his dog. Cartwright’s own words, and he flickered.
• The recommendation. Speaking French with Adrien about the Bourbons and Chandernagore, Ashworth revealed himself a Francophile, invited Adrien to assist with the settlement’s repatriation, and suggested he break the journey at Baranagar with his personal friend Devendra Ghosh.
• Outside. Bakar Ali, khansama of thirty years, vetted Pratap Singh at the gate and then gave him the full assessment of the table’s households over tea. Ratan, the Pelhams’ bearer, was caught palming silver spoons as the second course went in.

The third course and after (Session 10, 9 October)

• The hunt. Ashworth extended the tiger hunt for Saturday next, cheerfully noting that a wall of sepoys would stand between the party and the animal. Accepted. The written arrangements came Monday (Tiger Hunt Arrangements).
• The aside. Kali Puja named as the largest night of the year in the district and his least favourite for practical reasons, ten thousand on the ghats at Baranagar.
• Hale’s lights. Marcus Hale, silent and drinking all evening, spoke up when the temple came up: flickering lights, strange colours, chanting, seen on his night patrols almost every time he passed. No theory. A grunt, and back to his glass.
• Jessop and the bishop. Pressed on Bishop Middleton’s arrival, Jessop said warm things that rang hollow and admitted the strain of being paid by the Company and soon licensed by the bishop. The Company men grumbled agreement.
• Ghosh. Over the port, in French, Ashworth told Adrien how he met Ghosh: the Settlement survey of 1793, a Brahmin who came himself with his own papers in self-taught English and named the bribed surveyor, the flood the next year and the temple granary opened before the Company had finished its minute, and twenty years in which Ghosh has never once asked him for anything.
• Chandernagore, formally. Ashworth asked Adrien to survey the French settlement’s 1792 property titles and the temper of the town, and to reassure the French there as one of their own. When Adrien asked about keeping the engineer at Baranagar out of the Nepal posting, Ashworth said the Fort handles that and undertook to arrange a mess dinner at Fort William.
• The withdrawal. In the drawing room Harriet promised subscriptions to the Chowringhee Theatre and the Town Hall concerts; Diana shared the Ashworth-and-Harriet gossip, recommended Mullick’s nautch and named the zebras his; Lady Anne described Kali Puja with disgust; Mrs Wright said a friend of her husband’s had heard singing from the temple across the water at three in the morning; Meg called the Hooghly full of Diwali lamps the loveliest thing she had seen in India. Katherine defended the sisters’ gloves, and overheard Lady Anne’s ayah asking Pratap what family Mrs Ward had served before. Miss Fitch played, well.
• The port. Cartwright pitched his own syndicate to Freddy and was told to cost the godown rents and renewals on paper. Pratap served cigars and offered himself as taster.
• The spoons. See Ratan and the Spoons.
• The carriages. Cartwright’s syce and the Wrights’ bearer brawled at the palanquins; Bakar Ali waded in with a stick; Ashworth talked over it and every guest pretended not to hear. Georgiana pointed out, loudly, two servants dragging the unconscious Cartwright to his carriage, and Diana rebuked her for it. Ashworth saw the party off bare-headed, reminding them of the hunt and asking Adrien to think seriously about Chandernagore.

Outcome & Consequences

• Ghosh is shielded by Ashworth’s credit. The Magistrate is not complicit; he is vouching, and that is worse.
• An invitation to Baranagar exists, extended by the Magistrate himself, to the one village that holds both Renwick’s embankment works and the Mandir Mahakali temple.
• Cartwright is cracked, not turned. A seed, planted in front of witnesses, in a man who talks when drunk.
• Surlish has publicly insulted the Magistrate and does not appear to care.
• The hunt is accepted and Saturday and Sunday are gone to it.
• Georgiana broke the room’s fiction at the carriages and paid for it in Reputation.
• Ashworth now knows the party wants Renwick kept out of the war, and is arranging the Fort William mess dinner to put them in front of the men who decide it.