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Illustrations
    The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific illustration, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
     
Page 2: The Double Portrait (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)
Page 14: Captain Sir John Lindsay, Dido’s father (Burrell Collection, Glasgow)
Page 30: ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’, by Isaac Cruikshank (Private collection)
Page 50: Still life with meat, kettle, cup, sugar loaf and sugar lumps, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)
Page 64: Elevations of the north and south fronts of Kenwood House, and the interior of Lord Mansfield’s Library, by Robert and James Adam
Page 82: Lady Mansfield, Dido’s adoptive mother, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)
Page 102: Detail from ‘Four Times of the Day: Noon’, by William Hogarth (Private collection)
Page 110: William Murray, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)
Page 122: Granville Sharp, by George Dance (Frontispiece to Prince Hoare’s Memoirs of Granville Sharp , 1820)
Page 136: Report of the Somerset case (In T.B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials , vol. 20, 1816)
Page 152: Wedgwood anti-slavery pendant (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)
Page 160: The Gordon Riots, 1780 (Private collection)
Page 168: ‘Caen Wood in Middlesex, Seat of Earl of Mansfield’, engraving by James Heath, after a drawing by Richard Corbould (Private collection)
Page 186: The Zong : slaves being thrown overboard (Courtesy Everett Collection/REX)
Page 194: Mansfield as Lord Chief Justice, engraving after a portrait by Reynolds (Private collection)
Page 204: Dido Belle, amanuensis to the Lord Chief Justice (The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, by kind permission of the Treasurer and Masters of the Bench of Lincoln’s Inn)
Page 214: ‘Anti-Saccharrites’, by James Gillray (Private collection)
Page 226: The marriage of ‘John Davinie’ and Dido Elizabeth Belle (Westminster City Archive)
Page 242: Eastwell Park (Private collection)

1
    The Girl in the Picture

The Double Portrait
    A portrait from the late eighteenth century, it depicts two beautiful young girls. The white-skinned, fair-haired one in the foreground sits on a large, green, high-backed bench, and is dressed in pink silk with intricate lace trimmings. She has a garland of pink flowers in her hair and a double strand of pearls around her neck. She is holding a book. She is reaching out to the girl behind her, taking her arm as if pulling her into the frame. She hardly needs to do so, as the eye is drawn irresistibly to this other girl, with the high cheekbones and the enigmatic dimpled smile.
    The girl on the left is dressed in sumptuous white and gold satin, and wears a string of creamy large pearls around her neck. She has expensive-looking droplet pear and diamond earrings, and a white and gold bejewelled turban with an ostrich feather perching jauntily at the back. She carries a basket of fruit, and is wearing an exquisite blue and gold sheer shawl which floats in the breeze as she walks. She is in motion, bursting with vitality and energy. Her knee is bent forward beneath her dress, as if she is about to run as free as the wind. The girl in pink, by contrast, sits still.
    The standing girl rests a forefinger quizzically on her cheek as she gazes confidently at the artist. She almost seems to be sharing a confidence. In the conventions of portraiture, a pointing figure may denote a mystery, an enigma, a secret withheld. That may well be the case here, given the knowing look that goes with it. But the gesture also says, ‘Look at me. Look at the colour of my skin.’ It is as if she is asking, ‘Who am I? And what am I, a black girl, doing here?’
    The artist must have known that it was an unusual commission. The