The Queen’s Spade Summary, Characters and Themes

The Queen’s Spade by Sarah Raughley is a bold and unflinching historical fiction novel that reimagines the life of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African princess adopted by Queen Victoria, through the fictionalized lens of Sally—also known as Omoba Ina.  Set in 19th-century England, this richly layered narrative dismantles myths of imperial benevolence, revealing the cruel underpinnings of colonial domination.

The story follows Ina as she weaponizes the very etiquette, decorum, and bureaucracy of the British Empire to launch a campaign of revenge against the men and institutions that stole her identity, murdered her friend, and buried her culture under the guise of civility.  Her methods are strategic, her motivations deeply personal, and her goal is nothing less than justice on her own terms.

Summary

Sally, who also goes by her birth name Omoba Ina, begins the novel with a declaration: she intends to destroy every individual who contributed to the erasure of her heritage and the abuse she endured.  As a young girl, Sally was abducted from her Yoruba homeland, gifted to the British crown by King Ghezo of Dahomey, and subjected to dehumanizing scrutiny by a circle of British elites.

Her first night in England was a grotesque ceremony of dominance and cruelty—six aristocrats, including Mr.  Bellamy and the Forbes brothers, stripped her, examined her, and reduced her to an object of imperial curiosity.

Eventually, Queen Victoria adopted her and renamed her Sarah Forbes Bonetta, parading her as a living example of Britain’s supposed humanitarianism.  But behind the queen’s smile lay a power structure committed to control, not care.

At eighteen, Sally initiates her long-awaited plan for vengeance.  Her first target is Mr.

Bellamy, who had harassed her throughout her childhood.  Exploiting his weakness for drink and sex, she lures him into a vulnerable position and pushes him to his death, ensuring his reputation is posthumously ruined through a well-timed anonymous tip to the press.

This act sets the tone for her wider strategy: dismantling her abusers through calculated social and psychological warfare rather than brute force.

Her second major target is Captain George Forbes, one of the original men involved in her abuse and the murder of her friend Ade, a fellow orphan deemed “undesirable” by imperial standards.  To bring him down, Sally manipulates George’s former lover Sibyl Vale into rekindling a relationship with him.

With the help of Harriet, her loyal ally, and Rui, an influential figure in London’s criminal underworld, she arranges for George to be exposed in an opium den in front of Sibyl’s brother, James.  The confrontation destabilizes George, but the real blow comes later, when Sally’s agents torment him with hallucinations and staged reenactments of Ade’s death, pushing him toward madness and institutionalization.

The British elite, obsessed with appearances, find this disgrace more damaging than death itself.

Sally’s worldview is shaped by her years in a missionary institution in Sierra Leone, where she endured more violence under the guise of Christian charity.  There, she learned that the love and acceptance of the colonizer were always conditional.

After setting fire to the institution—a symbolic rejection of imposed morality—she carried those lessons back to England, prepared to play her enemies at their own game.  Queen Victoria, with her seemingly maternal demeanor, becomes another focus of Sally’s resentment.

The monarch views her as a symbol of successful colonization, but to Sally, she is the empire’s most insidious manipulator.

As Sally celebrates her victory over George Forbes, Queen Victoria retaliates in a chillingly bureaucratic way.  She arranges Sally’s marriage to a stranger, Captain Davies of Lagos, intending to exile her under the pretense of a strategic union.

Sally realizes that the Queen, masked in civility, is her most dangerous adversary—calm, calculated, and able to exert life-altering control without ever raising her voice.

Determined to expose the full extent of imperial cruelty, Sally digs deeper into the crown’s secrets.  She teams up with Rui to investigate the monarchy’s adoption of colonial children under the euphemistic “Wards of the Empire” program.

They discover a horrifying truth: children like Ade were deliberately discarded if they didn’t meet Victorian ideals.  Harriet, once an ally, begins to crumble under the weight of racial jealousy and class anxiety, culminating in a painful rupture between the two women.

Meanwhile, Gowramma, another ward, offers a glimpse into the fate of Duleep Singh, a child prince similarly used and discarded by the Queen.

In the wine cellars of Mulgrave Castle, Sally finds the final piece of proof: a letter from Queen Victoria to Duleep Singh explicitly outlining the imperialist logic behind the children’s selection.  The language is filled with the rhetoric of civilization and duty, but it lays bare a chilling program of eugenicist policy.

Armed with this evidence, Sally plans to confront the Queen directly.

However, the Queen accelerates her own plan.  At Balmoral Castle, she arranges a surprise wedding for Sally.

In the face of this ambush, Sally speaks candidly with Captain Davies, who, to his credit, respects her autonomy and agrees to walk away.  Sally then enters the Queen’s drawing room and reads aloud the damning letter.

The room erupts in scandal.  Harriet, having betrayed Sally once, now turns on her own mother and supports Sally, further fracturing the imperialist façade.

In the chaos that follows, Rui enters with a weapon, intending to assassinate John Brown, the Queen’s confidant.  The attempt fails, and a violent scuffle erupts.

Sally nearly stabs the Queen, but Bertie intervenes, unwilling to sacrifice his claim to the throne for justice.  Rui is shot and escapes.

Sally is arrested.

After three days in confinement, she is quietly released for her wedding.  But Sally, always one step ahead, has already enacted her escape.

With Davies’s assistance, she flees England under the cover of night, shedding her colonial name and title.  She is no longer Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the Queen’s African goddaughter.

She is Omoba Ina once more—free in body and spirit, though forever marked by the scars of empire.

The story’s conclusion underscores the futility of symbolic inclusion within systems built on exploitation.  Sally’s resistance was never about acceptance or integration.

It was about truth, power, and reclaiming autonomy.  Her departure from England is not a retreat but a declaration: she will no longer perform civility for those who denied her humanity.

Through this defiant act, she claims not only her future, but the right to mourn and honor the past on her own terms.

Characters

Omoba Ina (Sarah Forbes Bonetta)

Omoba Ina, known publicly throughout much of the novel as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, stands as the gravitational force of The Queens Spade.  Her transformation from a stolen African child to a weaponized fixture of British royal society embodies the central paradox of the narrative: a young Black girl turned imperial ornament who becomes an insurgent agent of empire’s undoing.

Her intelligence, emotional restraint, and capacity for strategic manipulation define her journey.  As a Yoruba princess, she begins the story with an intense hunger for justice rooted in the brutal loss of her family and cultural identity.

That trauma, intensified by the sexual harassment she suffered from Mr.  Bellamy and others, becomes the engine of her meticulously choreographed vengeance.

Ina is not reactive—she is deliberate.  Each of her acts, from exposing royal photographer Bambridge to orchestrating the fall of George Forbes, is layered with purpose: to tear down the systems that enslaved her body, mind, and history.

Ina is both warrior and tactician, understanding that in Victorian Britain, power often flows through propriety, appearances, and reputation.  She weaponizes these very tools against her enemies.

Yet, she is not untouched by the emotional costs of her campaign.  Her relationships with Harriet, Rui, and even Bertie reflect the constant tension between vulnerability and control.

The betrayal of Harriet, her conflicted attraction to Rui, and the burden of Bertie’s affections complicate Ina’s psychological landscape.  Even as she reclaims her name and sails away from England, she carries the memory of Ade and the ghosts of countless other “discarded” children.

In her final act of escape, Ina secures not only her freedom but her spiritual rebirth—an emancipation not granted by empire, but taken back from it.

Rui

Rui, the elusive and sharp-minded drug lord with links to global diasporic networks, is a character shrouded in mystery and danger, yet ultimately defined by a fierce loyalty to Ina.  His dual existence—part revolutionary, part criminal—allows him to traverse the underbelly of London while influencing the aristocratic sphere from the shadows.

Rui’s intellect rivals Ina’s; their relationship is one of equals bound by mutual recognition of pain, resistance, and purpose.  He provides her with resources, intelligence, and emotional connection, functioning at once as a romantic interest, co-conspirator, and ideological mirror.

Unlike others in Ina’s world, Rui never tries to control her—he respects her autonomy while sharing her vision of systemic disruption.

Rui’s complexity surfaces most powerfully in moments of risk: his attempt to assassinate John Brown during the séance at Balmoral is a desperate act, driven less by impulse and more by the accumulated rage of being shut out by systems that pretend to be benevolent.  His failure and near-death escape do not undermine his importance—in fact, they highlight the stakes of the battle Ina is waging.

He recognizes the cost of rebellion and continues to support Ina even when the odds turn against them.  Rui is less a romantic ideal and more a revolutionary companion, his presence affirming that Ina’s fight is not hers alone, but part of a wider, transnational resistance to colonial cruelty.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria is the novel’s most chilling antagonist, not because of overt violence but due to her embodiment of institutionalized power masked as maternal benevolence.  She is the architect of the “Wards of the Empire” program, a project cloaked in the language of charity and civilization, which in reality is a mechanism for racial control, eugenics, and moral cleansing.

Her adoption of Ina serves as the centerpiece of this illusion—presenting herself as a savior while quietly erasing and rewriting the identities of colonial children.  What makes Victoria terrifying is her belief in her own righteousness.

Her cruelty is administrative, not impulsive; she issues exiles, marriages, and contracts with an icy calm that suggests not apathy but conviction in the empire’s divine mission.

Victoria’s final confrontation with Ina, where she is forced to hear her own words read aloud, offers a rare moment of moral accountability—but even this scene reveals her refusal to change.  Her control over Bertie, over society, and even over Ina’s marriage plans underscores that her power is both personal and systemic.

She weaponizes femininity and motherhood in service of empire, reducing her wards to imperial propaganda.  Her final gesture—arranging Ina’s marriage and watching her walk down the aisle—symbolizes her unrelenting grip.

Yet, her inability to stop Ina’s escape reveals the limits of her influence when met with defiant agency.  Queen Victoria stands not as a singular villain, but as a personification of empire itself: polished, pragmatic, and utterly unrepentant.

Harriet

Harriet begins as Ina’s confidante and closest ally, helping her navigate aristocratic society and facilitating many of her covert operations.  Her quick wit, political insight, and genuine affection for Ina make her indispensable during the early stages of Ina’s campaign.

However, as pressure mounts—both social and familial—Harriet’s loyalties begin to fray.  Her jealousy over rumors of Ina’s involvement with Prince Bertie, combined with her internalized racial bias and desperation to maintain her own place in society, catalyze a deep rupture in their friendship.

The betrayal is heartbreaking, not just because it endangers Ina’s plans, but because it symbolizes the fragility of interracial alliances in the face of empire’s insidious pressure.

Harriet is not purely malicious—her eventual reversal and defense of Ina during the final confrontation with Queen Victoria reflect a complex moral reckoning.  But her character underscores how privilege, fear, and self-interest can corrode even the deepest bonds.

Harriet’s arc is a study in complicity, guilt, and the high cost of silence.  She serves as a cautionary figure: a reminder that good intentions mean little when not matched by courage.

Prince Albert (Bertie)

Prince Bertie, the Queen’s heir, is a figure of tragic contradiction—privileged, intoxicated by desire, and desperate for validation.  His affection for Ina is real but immature, driven more by infatuation and rebellion against his mother than by deep understanding of Ina’s mission or trauma.

Bertie’s advances constantly toe the line between romantic and predatory, underscoring the entitlement of men raised to view women—especially women of color—as ornamental.  Despite his fondness for Ina, Bertie repeatedly fails her.

He downplays the danger of Dalton Sass, refuses to take decisive action when presented with evidence, and ultimately chooses inheritance over justice during the final confrontation.

Yet, Bertie is not without complexity.  He helps Ina at crucial moments—rescuing her from Dalton’s attack, facilitating her marriage cancellation, and contributing to her eventual escape.

His struggle reflects the moral inertia of aristocracy: even when sympathetic, those born into power are often unwilling to dismantle the structures that benefit them.  Bertie is a tragic enabler—well-meaning but weak—and his presence highlights the limits of liberal allyship in the face of systemic injustice.

Dalton Sass

Dalton Sass emerges as one of the most formidable antagonists in the latter half of the novel.  His intellect, charm, and ability to manipulate people of influence make him a dangerous counterpoint to Ina’s calculated revenge.

A survivor of abuse by Mary Sass, Dalton carries deep psychological scars which manifest in sadism and a craving for dominance.  He exploits everyone—Inspector Wilkes, the Queen, even Bertie—in his quest for power, using blackmail, political maneuvering, and violence to advance his agenda.

His attempted assassination of Ina during a hunt exposes the depths of his depravity and the unrelenting threat he poses.

Dalton’s psyche is a toxic fusion of trauma and entitlement.  His need for control, especially over Ina, is driven by a twisted longing for maternal recognition and a desire to dominate what he cannot understand.

Yet, despite his cunning, he is ultimately undone by the very things he tries to hide: a childhood journal, suppressed truths, and Ina’s psychological insight.  He is the embodiment of imperial decay—a man whose intellect cannot outpace his own rot.

Ade

Though Ade dies early in the timeline of the story, his presence haunts the entire narrative.  As Ina’s childhood friend and emotional anchor, Ade represents the innocence lost to imperial violence.

His murder at the hands of George Forbes and others is one of the story’s most emotionally searing moments, sparking Ina’s resolve to dismantle the very institutions that sanctioned such cruelty.  Ade is the human cost of empire, his death symbolic of the children discarded by Queen Victoria’s “benevolent” colonial policy.

He is not just a memory, but a martyr—his spirit a constant reminder of why revenge, for Ina, is inseparable from justice.

Captain George Forbes

George Forbes epitomizes the monstrous banality of imperialism.  He is not flamboyantly evil; he is ordinary in his cruelty, embodying the quiet entitlement and racial violence of empire.

His role in Ade’s murder and his past abuse of Ina establish him as a man who sees colonial children as expendable and women as tools for pleasure or power.  Ina’s orchestration of his downfall—through public disgrace, drug-induced hallucinations, and eventual institutionalization—is one of the novel’s most satisfying arcs of retributive justice.

George’s collapse reveals that beneath the polished veneer of British respectability lies a fragile ego and a festering guilt.

Captain Davies

Captain Davies, initially presented as a pawn in the Queen’s scheme to re-exile Ina via marriage, undergoes a subtle but meaningful evolution.  His eventual decision to support Ina’s autonomy and help her escape reflects his growing recognition of the empire’s moral failures.

He is not a revolutionary, but he is a man capable of listening, learning, and choosing decency over obedience.  In helping Ina flee, Davies becomes an unlikely ally—proof that small acts of rebellion can be transformative when aligned with courage and conscience.

Themes

Revenge as Restoration of Dignity

Sally’s campaign of vengeance is more than an emotional reaction to trauma—it becomes a systematic reclamation of dignity in a world that has systematically stripped her of humanity.  Her every action is measured, not to inflict mere pain, but to restore equilibrium where injustice has prevailed.

From the moment she kills Mr.  Bellamy, she does so not just to end his life but to ensure that his legacy is tainted, his memory tarnished in the eyes of the elite society that once shielded him.

Revenge becomes Sally’s currency in a society that denied her autonomy.  Her meticulous orchestration of George Forbes’s downfall, the strategic shaming of William Bambridge, and the manipulation of Queen Victoria’s political image are all part of a greater ambition: to reverse the moral and social power dynamic that once positioned her as a specimen, a novelty, a political pawn.

Sally’s revenge never operates in the shadows of chaos—it is sharp, theatrical, and rooted in justice as she defines it.  It becomes the only language understood by those who masked their violence behind courtesy and empire.

This transformation of vengeance into dignity exposes the moral emptiness of British propriety and reveals Sally as the one with real power—not because she holds titles or wealth, but because she understands how to expose the rot beneath the empire’s gold-plated façade.

Colonialism and the Violence of Civilization

The novel lays bare the cruelty inherent in British imperialism, especially the ways in which violence was rationalized through the pretense of civilization and benevolence.  Sally’s initial abduction and her presentation as a diplomatic gift from King Ghezo to Queen Victoria embody the commodification of Black bodies in service of empire.

Her existence in England is predicated on an ideology that insists she is being saved, educated, civilized—even as it robs her of her name, her language, her culture, and her agency.  Queen Victoria’s Wards of the Empire program exemplifies this violence dressed in philanthropy: selecting children based on their usefulness, discarding the rest, and constructing a narrative that paints the monarchy as merciful.

The revelation that Ade was killed because he was deemed unfit for imperial display, and that others like him suffered similar fates, underscores how deeply embedded this ideology of conditional humanity was within the empire’s institutions.  Sally’s experiences at missionary school, where religion becomes another tool of oppression, and her final confrontation with the Queen, reveal a system that cloaks its genocidal logic in the language of godliness and duty.

The novel reveals how colonialism operated not just through military conquest, but through the everyday performance of morality, education, and etiquette—tools used to discipline, erase, and dominate.

Racial Performance and Strategic Passing

Sally’s survival depends on her ability to perform the role expected of her: the grateful, well-behaved African girl molded by British hands.  But this performance is a mask, one she expertly manipulates to secure her safety and execute her plans.

Her identity as Sarah Forbes Bonetta is an invention—a tool of imperial optics—and Sally is keenly aware of its utility.  She weaponizes her public image to gain access to elite spaces, manipulate figures like Prince Bertie, and cloak her subversive actions in the appearance of propriety.

This performance, however, comes at a steep cost.  It requires constant vigilance, emotional suppression, and the internalization of pain.

Sally must compartmentalize her grief, rage, and alienation in order to pass within a world that sees her either as a curiosity or a threat.  Her strategic use of this mask is a direct commentary on how race and identity are policed in colonial societies—not merely through law, but through expectations of behavior and gratitude.

When she finally sheds her identity as Sarah and reclaims her name, Omoba Ina, it is not only a rejection of the empire’s imposed narrative but a declaration that her survival no longer requires performance.  Her liberation comes not when she gains power within the empire, but when she walks away from it altogether, as her true self.

The Failure of Imperial Maternalism

Queen Victoria’s relationship with Sally is presented as the ultimate expression of imperial maternalism: the monarch as a benevolent mother figure to her colonial wards.  But beneath this image lies a cold, controlling calculus.

Victoria’s affection is conditional, her patronage transactional.  She adopts Sally not out of compassion but out of imperial optics, using her as proof that the British Empire is capable of civilizing even the most foreign of its subjects.

Her ultimate betrayal—arranging Sally’s forced marriage and exile—reveals the limits of her care.  When Sally confronts her with evidence of the empire’s eugenicist policies, Victoria’s reaction is not remorse but administrative efficiency, an attempt to silence, repress, and redirect the threat.

The Queen’s brand of cruelty is not overt—it lies in contracts, in veiled threats, in the calculated use of marriage, religion, and social status as tools of containment.  Unlike the physical violence of George Forbes or the psychological torment of Dalton Sass, Victoria’s manipulation is cloaked in soft power, making it all the more insidious.

Sally’s realization that the Queen is her most dangerous adversary repositions the monarch not as a misguided guardian, but as the architect of a system that kills without drawing blood.  The theme ultimately critiques the empire’s self-congratulatory narratives about motherhood and guardianship, exposing them as mechanisms of control and erasure.

Gendered Violence and the Weaponization of Femininity

Throughout the narrative, gender is portrayed as a site of both vulnerability and resistance.  Sally’s earliest traumas are gendered—her sexualization as a child, the exploitation of her body by men like Bellamy, the dehumanizing gaze of the British elite.

But rather than retreat into victimhood, Sally transforms femininity into a weapon.  She seduces, deceives, and manipulates the very structures that once confined her, using the expectations placed upon women to her advantage.

Her interactions with Sibyl Vale, Andrea Bradley, Harriet, and Gowramma reveal a complex web of female solidarity and betrayal.  Women in this narrative are often placed in impossible positions—forced to choose between personal loyalty and societal survival.

Harriet’s betrayal, Gowramma’s retreat, and Andrea’s disappearance underscore the fragility of female alliances under patriarchy and racism.  At the same time, Sally’s ability to outmaneuver male antagonists by playing into their assumptions about women’s passivity becomes a recurring method of survival and resistance.

Even her final escape hinges on the empire underestimating her—a woman presumed to be conquered, resigned, and obedient.  The theme explores how femininity, often used to justify subjugation, can be reimagined as a site of strategic defiance.

The Limits and Costs of Power

Power in The Queens Spade is shown to be unstable, conditional, and often self-destructive.  Sally attains significant influence over powerful men—royalty, law enforcement, criminals—but each victory extracts an emotional toll.

Her pursuit of vengeance isolates her, frays her relationships, and leaves her vulnerable to betrayal.  Rui, her most trusted ally and potential love interest, becomes a symbol of the uneasy intersection between romantic loyalty and political expediency.

Harriet’s shifting allegiance reveals how even allies can become liabilities when the stakes are high.  Power also exposes Sally to constant surveillance, manipulation, and danger; every move must be calculated, every alliance suspect.

Even as she topples her enemies, the narrative never presents power as redemptive or liberating in itself.  Instead, it is something she must eventually relinquish in order to reclaim her true self.

The decision to escape England, to abandon the chessboard entirely, marks a pivotal shift—from domination to autonomy.  In the end, power is not defined by control over others, but by freedom from the systems that seek to define and contain her.

This realization reframes the entire arc of Sally’s journey: not just as a conquest of her abusers, but as a radical departure from the imperial game altogether.