Eighteen
Eighteen
Once the party disbanded, Harriet, Andrea, and I cornered Detective Inspector Wilkes in an alleyway not far from there.
“I’ll make this quick because your lovely wife is waiting for you a few streets down from here, completely unaware that you
got another woman pregnant.”
He flinched when I spoke, his thin lips pressed together into a single line.
“You belong to me now. You’re going to do exactly as I say until I tell you I no longer require your services,” I told him.
“If you don’t, the whole of England will know who baby Charles’s father truly is.”
Andrea rubbed her belly, thoroughly pleased, as she’d already gotten her tea cakes and bag of shillings as promised.
Wilkes wiped his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief he pulled out of his breast pocket. “What do you want me to do?”
“In four days, an art gala will be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s a private event, funded by the Photographic
Society of London. Many of their members will be there.” I’d had it on my social calendar for months, but now it seemed it’d
act as the perfect stage for a show. “You are to be there too.”
Charles looked at us three women and didn’t know who he should fear more.
“She”—I jerked my head toward Harriet—“Is part of Queen Victoria’s inner circle. Try anything, and you’ll have to answer to
Her Majesty. You’ll see that being a close friend of royalty has its perks.”
“And who the hell are you ?” Wilkes spat. He truly wanted to curse, I could feel it. But his eyes kept darting toward the end of the alley, as if a
specter might come upon us in the dark at any moment.
I smiled, ladylike in the extreme. “For now? Your master.”
The plan was falling into place. But after Andrea and Wilkes had dispersed, there was something else I had to take care of.
“I’m sorry,” Harriet told me as we walked back toward Miss Welsh’s home. “Dalton Sass asked me to help him with the tea cakes
and I set the bottle down.”
“Never mind the obvious danger of leaving a bottle of arsenic lying around for anyone to take as they pleased,” I grumbled,
remembering to keep the point of judgment out of my tone. Otherwise I’d remind her too much of her mother and she might shut
down.
“I knew he was up to something.” Harriet wrung her hands together. “I just didn’t know he’d try to poison you.”
Yes, and poor Miss Welsh’s mother had taken the brunt of Sass’s attack. Well, she was the Royal Sussex County Hospital’s problem
now.
As we approached Miss Welsh’s home, I watched as Bertie, Sass, and Davies got into the same carriage together and took off.
This was an unholy union that would be difficult to break apart. Luckily, with Miss Welsh off to tend to her mother, my wife
lessons were, for now, suspended. I’d regroup in Chatham and figure out my next move.
“Harriet, remember that Dalton is dangerous.” I gripped her hand. “He’s not the kind gentleman he pretends to be. Don’t fall
for any more of his tricks.”
“What are you going to do, Sally?” Her bottom lip quivered.
“What I always do.”
Find out what he knew about the Institution.
Then dismantle him.
But first, I needed to use Wilkes while I had him on the bait. Bambridge, my next target, was about to get the full brunt
of my wrath.
Windsor Castle – 1856
“Relax, Sally. Yes, yes... that’s a good girl.”
He spoke to me as if I were a dog. A girl of thirteen, I absolutely could not relax, not with William Bambridge’s slimy voice
coaxing me in such an unsettling manner. His arrogance had only exploded since the last time I saw him. Back then, he was
merely present while I was being gifted to Queen Victoria, courtesy of Captain Frederick Forbes. Now he was the official royal
photographer to Queen Victoria. He’d already photographed many members of the royal family on their hunts. Even photographed
a few of their pets. What was another one?
“Surely you can relax, girl?”
I couldn’t. The dress the Queen’s ladies had put me in was too tight. It didn’t matter that its lace collar and silky sleeves
would have been envied by any socialite in the country—it was too tight. I felt squeezed by them. The Queen had ordered the
same ladies to do my hair. Of course, they had no idea what to do with its texture. The brush they used to comb Princess Alice’s
hair was a weapon of torture against my scalp. Tears leached from my eyes as they pulled it back into a clean sweep, parted
in the middle with some fabric covering it on both sides to make it more palatable for the cameras. I could still feel the
pain rocketing through my scalp as I sat here, desperate for this photo session to be over.
Sighing, Bambridge threw off the dark blanket used to cover his head as he peered through the box camera. He straightened up and glared at me as if I’d wounded him. As if his scalp felt raw and tender.
“Look around you, girl. The Queen herself has given you this private room to have your photo taken.”
It was a royal room, despite how little it was, with all the best furniture royal money could buy. The sunlight would have
burst through the arched windows to my right if not for the drawn, thick red velvet curtains. The marble floor was covered
by an expensive Turkish carpet gifted to her by princes of the Ottoman Empire, or so I was told.
At my side was a modest table, upon which a medley of random white fabric was placed. For what, I didn’t know. For the aesthetic,
I supposed. It was Bambridge’s idea. The whole concept of this photography session was his idea.
“I will not hide her Blackness, nor her natural features, as shocking as they may be,” he’d told the Queen. “I want the public
to see her body, to see how it contrasts so greatly against the delicateness instilled in her by polite British society. I
want the public to see the true Sarah Forbes Bonetta, which Queen Victoria has excavated from the barbarity of her outside
shell.”
I’d been standing right there as he spoke. And here in this uncomfortable wooden chair, remembering his words, I clenched
my teeth. This was a royal room indeed. But it was no different from the room I danced naked in as a child all those years
ago, when Forbes had first presented me to his gallery of rogues. His spoils from his trip to the Dahomey Kingdom. How Bambridge
had delighted in me that night as I debased myself for him and his villainous friends. Now there was no delight in his expression.
He had a job to do, praise to gain from the Queen of England, and I was stopping him from gaining it.
“What’s that?” Bambridge tilted his neck when he saw me tugging at my collar.
My hands paused. Oh no. I hadn’t meant to tug at my neck. I’d specifically ordered myself not to before entering the room.
“N-Nothing,” I stammered in my young voice, but Bambridge was already striding toward me. I tried to cover my neck and chest,
but to no avail. He tugged my hands away, reached down my blouse, and found them.
My Egbado beads. I didn’t know how in the world I’d managed to keep them all these years from the moment I was captured by
King Ghezo, throughout the trip to the Atlantic, to Sierra Leone and back. After Miss Sass would beat me in the Institution,
I’d pray to them for luck and support. Tiny, alternating red and white. They were my family charm. My tether to my old life,
to the parents I’d lost and yearned for. To my mother, who passed them down to me. Who used to sing to me folktales under
the swaying palm trees and the hot sun, with the red sand underneath our bare feet. Songs passed down from her mother and
her mother before her. Songs I could no longer remember.
“They’re making your collar look uneven.” Bambridge held out his hand expectantly. “Take them off and give them to me.”
“N-No,” I whispered. My sleeves felt heavy. Or was it my body?
“What?”
“I want them to stay on.” They were the only reason why I could still breathe.
His face contorted into a baffled expression. “Are you defying me, girl?” He didn’t even sound upset. More amused. But even
as a child, I could recognize the threat in his voice.
“Give them here,” he said again. “Now!”
I found my voice. “No!”
We fought like that for some time, first with words, until Bambridge began digging underneath my blouse, as if just for the one moment he wished I was no longer the young, delicate woman of society he was trying to portray me as. What a joke. He never once saw me as such. The tussle between us became so violent, the table I was to rest my elbow on began rattling, the beautiful red tablecloth and basket of fabric sliding back and forth.
Finally, with an angry yell, he grabbed my Egbado beads and tugged them. The necklace broke apart, red and white beads falling
all over the carpet.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Come clean this up,” Bambridge said to his assistants, who waited by the door. “Collect them and put them in the bin quickly.
I want to finish this session by lunchtime, confound it.”
They swept my beads into the trash. With it my mother. My father. My ancestors. The last physical connection I had to the
life I led before they transformed me. They’d already emptied out the trash bin before the session had ended.
The photograph was to one day be part of London’s Royal Collection Trust. But for now, Queen Victoria was given the photo
as part of her private collection. She loved it. The way my elbow rested on the side table. The way I held my hands together,
clasped ever so slightly.
Sally Forbes Bonetta, a native of Abeokuta. The caption underneath the picture.
Who was that person? Her three names confused me. Her empty eyes haunted me. I memorized them. I drew them over and over with
quill and ink. My drawer in Chatham was filled with them, each rendition of “Sally Forbes Bonetta” hollower than the last.
The portrait had captured my shattered soul, a fractured self with nothing to tether to but the fear only I could see in my
expression. The night I lost my mother’s beads, I returned home and was overcome by panic so visceral, I felt like I might
die. The Schoens didn’t understand the fuss. They gave me some water and told me to sleep. I’d be better by morning, they
told me.
It wasn’t. I spent days in my room, paralyzed. Staring at the scratches in my wall as if they were alive and mocking me, my mind filled up with fog, my skin crawling with phantom pains, my heart periodically going into overdrive, as if I would die any second.
The panic never really went away.