Cavendish Compound

private residence / compoundThe warmest room in the chapter, and the least private.

Description

Hugh and Meg’s walled compound in Chowringhee, and the party’s domestic base for the whole of Chapter 4. A single-storey bungalow raised on a plinth against the wet, with a deep pillared verandah running the full front and jhilmil shutters closed against the sun and opened at night. High ceilings, punkahs, matting rather than carpet. Cool by design and never quite cool.

Around it: outbuildings, stables, a garden gone violently green, and the servants’ lines.

Notable Features

• The establishment. A full household in the Bengal manner, and the roles are distinct and worth naming at the table: the durwan on the gate, the khansama who runs the house, khidmutgars at table, the ayah who has most of Little Freddy’s daily care, bearers, a syce, a mali, a dhobi, a bheestie carrying water, and sweepers at the bottom of a hierarchy the British do not see and the household observes exactly.
• The durwan’s chair is positioned to see the whole carriage drive and the servants’ path at once. That is not an accident.
• Little Freddy’s room. Two years old, named for Freddy Cavendish. Establish the geography of this room lightly and early and never point at it.
• The verandah is where the party gets its first unstructured hour ashore. See Hugh Cavendish Veranda Gathering.

The Plan

A central bungalow with two detached guest houses, which is how a Company factor of Hugh’s standing houses eight unexpected arrivals without anyone sleeping in a corridor. Guest houses of this kind are ordinary in Calcutta compounds: a family builds one for visiting relatives, for a bachelor brother, for the season when everyone comes down from the districts.

Hugh has two, and both have been standing half empty for years. He is delighted to fill them.

The Buildings

The bungalow

Single storey, raised on a plinth of about three feet against the wet, with a deep pillared verandah running the full front and a shallower one behind for servants’ access. Tiled roof, high ceilings, jhilmil louvred shutters closed against the sun and folded back at night. Matting on the floors rather than carpet, because carpet rots.

Front to back: the front verandah is the evening room and where everything that matters gets said. Inside, a central hall with the dining room and drawing room off it, Hugh and Meg’s bedroom and the nursery to the west, Hugh’s office and a single guest bedroom to the east.

Freddy is in the house. Not in a guest house. Hugh would not hear of his cousin sleeping anywhere but under his own roof, and the room was made ready a week before the ship was sighted.

The West House, which the household calls the ladies’ house

Four rooms and its own verandah, forty yards west across the garden.

• Emma and Georgiana have the two front rooms with a connecting door, which Meg arranged without being asked because sisters.
• Katherine has a room at the back, off the passage.
• Ashby has the smallest room, at the back, nearest the servants’ path.

The East House, the bachelors’ house

Two rooms and a verandah, forty yards east.

• Adrien has the better of the two, because he is a Viscount and Hugh, who is untroubled by nearly everything including the recent war, thinks that is simply correct.
• Thomas has the other, which has a spare bed in it that nobody is using.

The escort’s room

Pratap Singh is quartered in the compound, in a small whitewashed room built against the wall beside the gate. A charpoy, a chest, a peg, and his own door onto the drive. It was put up years ago for a chowkidar Hugh no longer employs and it has stood empty since.

He does not sleep in a guest house and he was never going to. A havildar of the 67th assigned as escort to visiting Britons is not a guest, and nobody in the household, including him, would find the suggestion anything but embarrassing.

He does not sleep in the servants’ lines either. He is a high-caste NCO of the Bengal Native Infantry, he holds the Company’s warrant, and he outranks every man in those lines in a way that has nothing to do with the household’s hierarchy and cuts straight across it. He cooks for himself, eats alone, and observes his own dietary practice, which is completely ordinary, entirely correct, and means that nobody in this compound thinks it strange when he is not where he was.

The working buildings

Servants’ lines along the east wall, cookhouse detached because of fire, stables to the west with the syce, the palanquins and Meg’s mare, and a masonry tank in the middle of the garden for bathing and washing.

About twenty-two people live inside this wall, plus the escort at the gate. The party can name two of them.

The Gate, and the Other Gate

The main gate is at the south, with the durwan’s chair beside it, positioned so that one seated man sees the whole carriage drive and the servants’ path at the same time. That is not an accident and it is not sinister. It is what a durwan’s chair is for, in every compound in Chowringhee, and the gatemen of those compounds talk to each other every evening. See Calcutta 1814, Surveillance Networks.

The side gate is at the north-east corner, for deliveries and the bheestie’s water. Nobody watches it, because there is nothing to watch: it opens onto a service lane used by the households on either side.

The Senses, Room by Room

• The front verandah at night. Rain off the roof into a gravel channel in an unbroken sheet, loud enough that a conversation four feet away is private. Lamps turned low because of the insects. Everything past the rail is solid black.
• The hall and drawing room. Matting, damp lime plaster, lamp oil, beeswax. Dark polished wood and brass that somebody cleans daily. A khidmutgar crosses more often than anyone counts.
• The guest houses. Newer, plainer, and smelling faintly of disuse: dry matting, whitewash, and the particular cold-stone smell of a room that has been shut.
• The garden between them. Banana, plantain, neem and something flowering heavily at night. Warm and thick and green past the point of looking natural.
• The lines at dawn. Woodsmoke, cooking oil, water being drawn, and about twenty people beginning a day the party will sleep through.

The Geography That Matters Later

Connections

• Chowringhee
• Hugh Cavendish, Margaret Cavendish

In Play

Chapter 4, Session 10 (9–10 October 1814) — the late council and the Monday tray. Back from Garden Reach the party sat late over Hugh’s snacks and settled the week: Thursday to Baranagar together, Adrien on to Chandernagore, a security detail asked of Pratap Singh, and the family’s evacuation put to Hugh (Compound Council 9 October). Monday’s breakfast tray carried three papers: the Salisbury letter, the Government House card and the hunt arrangements.

Chapter 4, Session 11 (11 October 1814) — the wild goose chase, and the evening on the veranda. Katherine spent the afternoon sent hunting for nonexistent secret passages through thorn bushes by household servants who had decided she was nobody, until a thoroughly drunk Freddy staged an exaggerated public display of deference to her in full view of the watching staff, restoring her standing by evening. That night, as the tail end of the monsoon set in, Hugh hosted guests on the veranda — Captain George Drury and his wife Fanny, Alistair Glennie, Lieutenant William Maitland and his wife Clara, and the widow Diana Lockhart. Baijnath Mullick made a flamboyant entrance in a carriage drawn by zebras, and Hugh’s casual revelation that Mullick runs the GoDown Syndicate’s opium warehouses secured the Wentworth sisters a tour on Thursday. After the last carriage rolled away, the party overheard a sharp argument upstairs between Hugh and Meg, who refused to be sent off to the countryside without being told what Hugh knew. See By Command of His Excellency.

Campaign Log

• Session 12 - The Governor’s Ball — Hosted the Wednesday 12 October breakfast: Edward Renwick joined the table, the Gazette’s Found Drowned notice and a basket of Mullick’s out-of-season mangoes arrived with the morning post, and a separate sealed letter reached Freddy Cavendish. When the investigators showed Hugh and Meg the truth of what they are facing, Meg went pale and retired to her room and Hugh fell into a panic. Two sepoys, Ram Adhin Tiwari and Ghulam Rasul, are now posted on the compound guard alongside Pratap Singh.
• Session 13 - Sundry Fittings — The servants were set to securing the grounds against the storm under Meg’s direction, so Pratap drove the party to the Zorab sale himself. The party came back late at night in a carriage with its roof torn open.
• Session 14 - A Morning of Manners and Monstrosities — dawn on Thursday: Meg found the carriage smashed in the yard, with Mi-Go carapace and wing dissolving in the sun. Pratap had a carpenter, an upholsterer and a painter at work on it, and the horses seen to and replaced, billed to the Company. Freddy and Katherine stayed here with the cylinder when the others went upriver.
• Session 15 - The River of Rites and Ruin — the guard was reviewed; Meg kept to the guarded nursery; the Surlishes dined; Sophia stayed; Surlish called Freddy out; two heavy thumps landed on the roof as Katherine came back.

Appearances