“They are very pretty,” Jasper said. He moved forward to look at them, then paused a foot from the cage. “Do they bite?”
“No, these two were born inside. They trust people.”
The children leaned in to look at the birds. “I thought you might help me take care of them,” Sera said. “Birds get very lonely and I’m so very busy. Perhaps, you could come from time to time and help me keep them company.”
It touched Adam deeply that she’d thought of this.
Sera had said she needed him to show her how to build a life with someone else. But he suspected she did not need his help at all.
Jasper looked at Adam. “May we?”
Adam smiled. “Of course.”
As the children chattered to each other about what they would name the birds, Adam caught Seraphina’s eyes.
She smiled at him. Long and calm and happy.
“Shall we have lunch?” she asked the children. “I am very keen to hear of your adventures on the way from London.” She came and draped an arm over Marianne’s shoulders. “I hope you have not exhausted your dear auntie.”
And as his family gathered outside in the sunshine, he looked into Seraphina’s eyes across the table.
“I love you,” he mouthed to her.
Her eyes filled.
She pressed two fingers over her heart and mouthed the words back.
Epilogue
From The Society of Sirens: A Memoir
By Seraphina Arden, 1827
If you had told me the night that Elinor went missing that our rebellion would lead to my falling in love with a man, having a child with him, and gaining his family as my own, I would have scoffed at you that that was not the kind of ending I considered happy.
I would have said that the domestication of the female sex was tantamount to her imprisonment. That the burden of motherhood would diminish my powers, distract me from my fight.
I would have argued that I was more effective as a voice for women who’d been denied such things, or who’d rejected them.
But I continue to recall a romantic thing that Adam Anderson first said to me in a letter: I am reduced by the loss of you.
And I have thought often, over our years together, of the corollary: your love increases me.
You see, he was always wise, my Adam.
It turned out the more I began to love, the more I became.
I did not lose myself by loving Adam, nor our children. I became fuller. Richer. I discovered I could be a Rakess, an Intellectual, a Mother, a Renegade, a Helpmeet, and a Siren, all at once.
I never married Adam Anderson, but he stands across the room from me most days as I write these memoirs, painting.
Is it too earnest to confess I still can’t take my eyes off him? That he’s still the kindest man I’ve ever known? That even in our worst moments, and of course, there have been many—he was always nice—except in bed?
He would go on to build the institute, and many other things beside it, and to help arrange our life so that I could be all the versions of myself I wanted to. I like to think that, in my way, I did the same for him.
But that is getting ahead of the rest of the story.
That winter, as I prepared to leave the happy little nest I’d been enjoying with Adam and return to London to prepare for Cornelia’s exhibition, I received the news that Lord Bell had finally filed a petition to Parliament for a divorce.
I rushed back to London to be with Elinor.
And what I found there made me question all the progress we had made.
For that was not all Lord Bell had done.
He’d taken Jack.