Ten
Ten
A deal was a deal. As much as Rui helped me with my schemes, I had to help Rui with his. I didn’t mind giving him a hand with
whatever gambit he was planning—as long as the price wasn’t too high.
Bring this John Brown into the Queen’s circle. Should be easy enough.
Bertie’s attendants had a habit of reading all letters sent to him before giving them to their prince. This request has to
be on the quiet. It would work out for both of us that way.
I was Mrs. Schoen’s obedient little doll for the next few days, studying and doing my chores in Chatham. One day, when I was
helping Mama plant roses in the front yard, I was greeted by this jewel of a conversation.
“People everywhere are talking about what happened to Captain George Forbes. Even out here.” Mama wiped the sweat forming
round her neck under the hot afternoon sun and gave a paranoid glare at our neighbors down the street. A few of them had taken
to gossiping about us, but that was a normal occurrence here when you were the only Black family in the area.
Kneeling in front of the dirt next to our front porch, I ran my fingers along a rose petal. “Gossip tends to spread very quickly.”
I said it without emotion.
“Yes, and that’s what’s so awful about it!” Mama shook her head and bent down next to me. “Oh, the poor Queen! The other day at the coffee shop, I heard Mrs. Wilkinson cluck about the Queen’s poor company.”
I stooped over because pretending to smell the rose helped hide my grin. All of it would lead back to the Queen. And soon
there’d be more to damage her reputation.
Mama sighed. “I just hope Her Majesty is okay.”
My grin turned into an irritated scowl. There she went again. “You know, Mama, sometimes, to me, it seems very much like you
would rather be the Queen’s adopted goddaughter in my place.” I snorted. Or maybe she was just bored because her husband was
never around.
Mama gave me a soft knock on the side of my head with her knuckle. I pursed my mouth closed as she continued gardening and
tittering on about the Queen. I didn’t know what it was about Mrs. Elizabeth Schoen that made me act like such a brat. She
wasn’t my mother. My mother had been brutally murdered years ago.
But although I couldn’t admit it to Mrs. Schoen, my heart shook whenever this woman bought me clothes or coaxed me into drinking
my favorite tea. I complied whenever I remembered she did all this while her husband was away. And he was always away. Or
maybe they just looked alike. Something about the smoothness of her round nose and the delicate curve of tiny ears that reminded
me of my real mother, long dead.
I shook my head. This was all just sentimental nonsense. I had to get back to my real work.
Once the chores were done, I was off to London. Pall Mall.
I’d always felt Pall Mall was an interesting contradiction. Separated by garden and fence from the squalid pandemonium of
the London roads, Pall Mall held a kind of tranquility—at least from the outside. It was a street that housed some of London’s
most magnificent buildings, where only men of standing could frequent their classical architecture.
But what did those rusticated stone blocks hide from the public? Gentlemen’s clubs. Of every kind. The chaste and the debauched. Pall Mall was the beating heart of a wealthy man’s social life. Marlborough House, which was to be the Prince of Wales’s main residence once he was officially married to Alexandra of Denmark, was hidden from civilian sight, tucked away in the corner between St. James’s Palace and Green Park.
Perfect for the so-called Prince of Pleasure.
“Miss Sarah Forbes Bonetta,” the doorman introduced me as I entered the corridor. As if anyone was listening.
I smirked as I floated elegantly through another set of double doors, into the main hall. What a nice gathering Bertie had
managed to put together underneath the two-tiered chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. Nearly all were young people
who’d already debuted into society. Hoop skirts of every bright color took up space on the marble floor, false curled hair
under silk bonnets. Young men’s lounge jackets were strewn to the side, bow ties just a little unkempt, enough to tantalize.
While some violinist played music in the corner, many of the young guests paired up, holding gloved hands, chatting, touching,
and downing whatever wine was passed to them by discreet servants—discreet, because the servants knew as well as the youths
that whatever drugs they passed between them had to be kept quiet from their parents.
“Sally! Sally, is that you?”
I instantly recognized the woman, though she was half blindfolded in silk. Giggling, she slipped a young man’s hands off her
waist as the loose blindfold finished tumbling down her brown neck. There were nail marks on his. I didn’t want to know whatever
game she was playing. The young man didn’t seem to want to stop groping her. She had to elbow him in the gut before he got
the message.
“Lady Gowramma!” Waving my silk hand fan, I moved to greet her only to have her grab my hand and pull my arm to the side. She looked me up and down, as she usually did whenever we crossed paths at functions. “I dressed especially well for you, for I suspected you’d be here,” I added with a little chuckle.
The devil’s red from head to toe. The pleated silk neckline of my dress hung off my sharp shoulders. Gowramma touched her
bottom lip, appreciating the sight of my slender bare arms flowing out from underneath the short sleeves.
“You look delectable as usual.” She took my hand and spun me around as if leading me in a dance. “You know I’ve always been
strict about how you present yourself, for good reason. The most important reason being that it drives the little rich white
girls here crazy when you look unspeakably gorgeous.”
She poked me in the ribs and flicked her head to the side. Sure enough, there was a pack of them sneering at us from the other
side of the room.
“I’ve been in this country longer than you,” said Gowramma. “I know how things work in English high society.”
“If I recall, you were presented to the Queen the same year I was.”
“But then you went off to boarding school in Africa. It’s the time spent that counts, you know.”
We’d had this debate before: who had spent more days in English captivity, though for Gowramma it was always in jest. I doubted
she saw living here as captivity at all. Despite the British ruining her father, the ruler of Coorg, he had apparently always
been grateful to the British who helped him retake his kingdom from Tippu Sultan. Alliances bred strange bedfellows.
Sometimes, Gowramma would tell me stories of her past—the English manners of her numerous siblings, her father’s habit of dressing her in the European style. From those tales, it was clear to me that Anglophilia was something of a norm among the Coorg elite. These days, from what I could see, she rather liked her new life in England with her wrinkled white husband thirty years her senior—John Campbell, a military man.
“How is your senile better half?” I asked as she patted down her long brown hair from the center part. “I take it the Lieutenant
Colonel doesn’t know you’re here?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, he’s at home with Edith. I told him I was having theater night with the girls.”
“And if Edith needs anything?”
“The nannies will handle it, I’m sure.” She exchanged a lustful glance with a young man whose face was half-obscured with
a feathered masquerade mask.
Rather flippant way to treat her daughter, but I wasn’t one to judge. The idea of having a child sent chills down my spine
worse than the thought of being a kept woman. Gowramma and I were peers in too many ways and yet so different at the same
time. Like me, she was a former princess, born to the last ruler of the Coorg kingdom in India. Like me, she was taken by
the British military and presented like a trophy to the Queen. But she didn’t seem to mind it at all. Only two years older
than I, she was already a mother. And while Queen Victoria had wanted her to marry a fellow Hindoostani, she had her sights
set on the good old-fashioned wealth of a European nobleman. Her daughter, Edith, was a product of her persistence, though
of course the child was nowhere to be seen here.
I liked Gowramma. Her innate ability to defy the odds for the sake of whatever fun she could still have as a married woman
was commendable. But sometimes my fellow princess reminded me of who I could have been had I been a little more compliant—even
grateful toward the Queen. And that led to visions of a nightmarish future should I fail to hold on to the rage that glued me together.
“I’m looking for the Crown Prince of England.” I peered through the thick crowd. “You haven’t seen him here, have you? Although
I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t.” I tugged the blindfold off her neck. “Seems like you’ve been a little busy.”
Gowramma snatched back the blindfold, smiling secretively at the servant who passed by, averting his eyes. “Oh, I’m sure Bertie’s
around here somewhere, buried in women.” She paused and gave me a sidelong look. “But whatever could you want with him?”
“That’s my business.” I folded my arms. “Feel free to carry on with yours, dear.”
Before I could leave, the Indian princess gripped my wrist and pulled me close. I could feel her tongue close to my ear. “Aim
high, dear Sally, but not too high. You know the rules.”
Rules. Yes, that was the nightmarish future she reminded of. One filled with their rules.
“Your conception of what and who are considered ‘high’ needs some adjustment.” She gave these people far too much credit.
I rolled my eyes and continued through the hall.
Some gentlemen stretched out their hands and offered me a dance as I passed as if it was some prize for me. As if I should
have been grateful to dance with such louts. Still others looked on and whispered behind their hands:
“Is that the fabled African princess?”
“Queen Victoria’s ward?”
The hairs on my arms stood on end. I clenched my teeth and hid my scowl behind a silk fan, wishing I could use it as a weapon.
The sharp tips would be put to good use.
“Imagine getting to have a dance with her—I can’t imagine a better parlor story.”
I heard every word. Which is why when the young man looking for a tale to tell approached me for a dance, I very stealthily and quite by accident stomped my heel into his foot.
“Please excuse me.” I bowed my head as tears of pain dripped from his eyes.
It was an odd sensation, existing in this liminal space, belonging nowhere, and yet so hypervisible I couldn’t escape them.
Even if they hated me, they wouldn’t let me be. Ironic. As if my very existence was necessary for the forging of their own
identities, they kept me locked by their gazes, burdening me with the responsibility of their contradictions. Their eyes hungered
with both disgust and obsession, longing and fear—opposites that laid the bedrock of their imperial design. The rules of British
society never made any sense. Why live by them?
I looked for Bertie, but he was not among the bouquets of flowers by the walls or the tall candelabras a safe distance from
the red velvet curtains. I knew he’d be where the true action was, so I continued to push past perfumed bodies until I reached
the front of the hall, monitored by the golden-framed portrait of Queen Anne, more than a century dead.
“May I have this dance, my lady?” Another offer.
“Maybe next time. Forgive me.” I didn’t even turn. I’d already spied cigar smoke seeping out of the door in the corner. The
true action...
“Surely just one?”
I felt his hand gripping my shoulder, and it wasn’t some light touch. His fingers pinched my bare flesh as if he meant to
tear off an arm. Shocked, I whipped around, fighting the impulse to swing at him.
“Didn’t I tell you—?”
The young man nearly yanked off my hand, pulling me into a dance I didn’t want—this boy with cheeks so sunken and lips so parched it looked as if he hadn’t had a meal in days. His long face stretched into a grin as he spun me around, satisfied with the attention we were getting from the others, who watched us in awe and amusement. Despite my seething glare, his green eyes sparkled with victory. They were hungry. But not the kind of hunger I’d seen in any of the bored young men and women looking for a bit of a thrill. It wasn’t lust either. I was old enough to recognize the musty smell of a man in heat. This wasn’t that.
He was like a hunter who’d captured his prey. That was it. It was as if he’d been waiting for a deer with a crossbow in hand.
An unnerving shadow passed over his expression.
Familiar. Something about him felt familiar. Was it his sharp facial features? The aura of hateful arrogance?
“Student number twenty-four, correct?”
I flinched, shocked. That was my number in the Institution.
I pursed my lips together for a moment. Just that act alone made his crooked smile wider, his back straighter. Despite years
of training my face to do as I pleased, I was giving far too much away, but I couldn’t help it. I hated being surprised.
He was tall and lanky, but as he danced, he didn’t seem to care about maintaining a dignified posture—imposing was what he
aimed for. His hands held mine just a pinch too tightly. But even that pinch felt calculated.
“I’d heard rumors you’d returned to England.” His curly mop of light brown hair covered part of his fan-shaped ears. “Good
to see the weather suits you here. I can’t say I’m used to it quite yet. I don’t think my mother told me enough about England
to prepare me for it.”
“And what do you mean by that? Who are you? Are you from Freetown?”
Now that I thought of it, his accent wasn’t the same as all the other English here. Part of it sounded familiar. English-speaking Brits who grew up in Western Africa all had this obnoxious quality to their voices. Even back when I was a child living with my clan, I saw enough of them to parse out the differences. It wasn’t like us speaking English. Maybe because there wasn’t really anything at stake for them. Rather, their accents always reminded me of the careful, strategic overconfidence of the short, stumpy men I’d seen working as colonial administrators and pastors. They struck each syllable with a kind of clumsy presumptuousness that you weren’t allowed to laugh at despite having every reason to. Of course, even before I was torn from my parents, I knew I’d be thrown in jail if I ever actually laughed at one of them.
There were plenty of them in Freetown too.
“I asked you several questions.” My whisper was menacing, perhaps more so because of how I managed my expression into a polite
smile.
And he matched them both. “Oh, trust me, I heard them.”
He didn’t seem to mind that I ripped my hands from his grip. In fact, he was amused.
“Let’s do this again sometime, student number twenty-four. I have no doubt we will.”
Why did that amicable smile hit me like Miss Sass’s cane across my hands? I bit the inside of my cheek, my body flinching
instinctively as he bowed his head and walked off.