Clive Street, Calcutta
11th October, 1814

Sir Nathaniel,

I have had the very great pleasure of receiving your daughters at my office, and I write at their particular desire to lay before you the present state of the family’s interest in Bengal, which I fear my earlier letters to Mr Duffield will not have made sufficiently plain. The fault is mine. A man who has held an account for nineteen years grows to think that what is clear to him must be clear to everyone.

The indigo lands at Nadia, which have been declining these seven years, I realised in the spring of 1812 upon the best terms then to be had, and I employed the whole of the capital in a subscribed share of the Strand Godown Partnership, a body of the first respectability in this city, whose managing partner is Baboo Baijnath Mullick, a gentleman whose name will be known to you from the public prints and whose charities are the admiration of the settlement. The Partnership owns the warehouse frontage through which the trade of this port must pass, and its dividend, which is paid yearly, has stood at eight and a half and at nine parts in the hundred in the two years since. I enclose a memorandum of the share.

The remittances have been interrupted, and I will not pretend otherwise, because the Partnership’s deed requires that the partners consent before any share is reduced, and because a call was made upon the partners in the spring for the extension of the frontage, which engaged the balance I had kept by for Hawthorne Grange. I had every expectation that the call would be met and the balance restored before a letter could reach you and return, and I was wrong in that expectation, and I ask your pardon for it.

I am able to say that the interest is entirely sound. Baboo Mullick, to whom I spoke of your daughters’ visit this very afternoon, was kind enough to say that he would think it an honour to receive them, and to show them the property in which the family’s fortune is placed, and that should the family ever wish to reduce its holding he did not doubt that a transfer might be arranged upon terms, among friends. I could ask for no better assurance in Calcutta.

The Misses Wentworth will carry this letter to you themselves. I have not sealed it, so that they may read what I have written and know that I have written nothing to you that I would not say to them.

I have the honour to remain, Sir Nathaniel, with the greatest respect,

Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Crispin Pargeter