Book excerpt: Sarah Bonetta Forbes, 'Queen Victoria's African Princess', was rescued from Africa as a girl of seven after the slaughter of her family. Offered by King Gezo of Dahomey as a gift to the Queen, she was taken to England. Spending part of her childhood there and part back in Africa, she married Captain James Davies in 1862 and they settled in their native continent, where she became a teacher and died of tuberculosis at Madeira in 1880. Her story has rarely been told before by earlier biographers, or even noticed in lives of the Queen. It makes one of the most unusual, not to say fascinating, episodes in the annals of the British Victorian court.