Part One
From The Society of Sirens: A Memoir
By Seraphina Arden, 1827
Contrary to the legend, the night we formed the Society of Sirens did not begin as a revolt.
It began, ironically, with French champagne chilling in a silver bucket.
With me, wearing a new dress of scarlet silk and feeling my pulse beating in my throat as I applied the scent of bergamot to the hollows of my neck and thought, Tonight will mark the era of our vindication.
I remember swishing down the hall in that red gown, feeling like a dancer about to pirouette onstage after a lifetime of rigorous rehearsal. I stopped to pick up Jack Willow’s paper, so I could brandish it triumphantly as I greeted my three friends. I had rehearsed the words I would say to them in greeting, holding up our essay:
Relish it, my darlings. Look how far we’ve come.
So many years had passed since Lady Elinor Bell had first introduced us. Back then, we had been three lost, fallen girls, landing in Elinor’s parlor from disparate corners of society with only our low morals in common. I was the Cornish miner’s ruined daughter, correcting Jack Willow’s circular by day and bedding philosophers by night. Cornelia was Elinor’s niece, cast out by her aristocratic family when her relations with her painting tutor proved more than educational. And Thaïs was a lady of the night who had come to Elinor seeking donations to start a charity for girls forced into prostitution.
Elinor made daughters of us. She taught us that family could be hewn from love rather than blood. She showered us with guidance, introductions, and bequests, insisting that the misfortunes of our lives had been shaped not by any failing in our characters but by the concessions, injustices, and heartaches that made womanhood a kind of penalty.
She insisted on a principle that our biographies had theretofore contested: that we mattered. That girls—even so-called ruined ones—were not a thing that could be thrown away.
She’d saved us.
And now, with the publication of this essay, we were going to save others.
The article called for pledges to build a philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex. We’d all had a hand in crafting the proposal, but only Elinor had signed it. We’d thought this was a clever act of subterfuge. The Crown increasingly saw the faintest whisper of equality as sedition—to stamp such a proposal with the names of disgraced women would certainly raise ire.
We reasoned that the faultless reputation of a proper matron like Lady Bell could disguise the radicalism of our ideas enough to demand a hearing.
We assumed that Elinor—a matriarch, a wife, a viscountess—was safe.
But we were wrong.
For when I answered the door that night, Elinor was not with Cornelia and Thaïs.
Instead, they clutched Jack Willow between them—hunched and bleeding, with two black eyes. Thaïs was breathing shallowly. Cornelia, who never cried, was weeping.
“What’s happened?” I asked, rushing them inside. “Where’s Elinor?”
“He’s taken her,” Thaïs whispered. “Lord Bell. Says she’s gone radical and destroyed his good name.”
“Taken her?” I sputtered, still not understanding. “But where?”
Jack leaned against the wall. “He won’t say.”
Cornelia gestured at Jack’s swollen face. “He ransacked Jack’s shop. Said he’s going to the papers to expose Jack and Elinor as Jacobins and adulterers. Threatened to sue Jack for criminal conversation, shut down the whole press.”
Elinor had always dismissed her husband’s jealousy over her friendship with Jack as amusing proof that Lord Bell, beneath his bluster, loved her.
But Bell’s possessive streak had been a symptom of ownership, not affection. And Elinor, despite her greater intellect, her larger fortune, and her kinder heart, was her husband’s minion under law.
And he wanted her to know it.
We realized, that night, that we’d miscalculated; Elinor had never been safe. And if she wasn’t, no woman was.
And if no woman was safe, what was the point of being cautious?
If the finest lady any of us knew could be abducted from her home by the man to whom she’d dutifully borne two children, then what did adherence to the codes of feminine respectability protect?
Perhaps there was more freedom in being the kind of woman who was not respectable. For such women have little left to take away.
As infamous, unmarried ladies branded harridans and whores in the endless gossip about us in the papers, did we not possess a kind of power? Bad women, after all, are the subject of endless fascination to the sex that wants to subjugate us. We were accustomed to our misdeeds being chronicled in headlines, discussed in village squares.
Why not attach our ideas to this notoriety? Why not raise money for our cause by waging a war of shock and scandal?
It was only then that we opened the champagne. We raised our glasses not in a toast but in a vow: to create a place that would make the world more safe for women like Lady Bell. For women like ourselves. For all womankind.
And to get Elinor her freedom from Lord Bell.
Which is all to clarify the rumor that the night we formed the Society of Sirens had been planned as a rebellion all along.
It wasn’t.
Sirens, you see, are not born thirsting for justice.
Sirens are made.
Chapter One
Thirty years earlier
Kestrel Bay, Cornwall
June 1797
At the ungodly hour of half past two on a sun-braced afternoon, Seraphina Arden stood before her looking glass in her flimsiest chemise, squinting against the glare coming off the ocean as she removed pins, one by one, from her coiffure.
She unspooled a long curl from above her temple and arranged it to trail over her left breast, drawing the eye to the hint of pink one could just barely make out through her thin lawn shift. She untucked another tendril from her nape, letting it unfurl down the middle of her back. The effect was louche, as though she had been grabbed in a passionate embrace.
Perfect.
She was the very image of an utterly ruined woman.
Henri enjoyed that kind of thing, if she recalled.
It had been years since their last encounter, but the memory of those nights in Paris still made her breath catch. Even mediocre painters had a facility with their hands that elevated the purely carnal to an art form—and Henri’s work was celebrated on three continents.
She draped a cloak around her shift and set off down the coastal path toward the abandoned belvedere at the border of her property and Jory Tregereth’s. As weather-wizened as a ruin, perched precariously among the cliffs, the old folly afforded a magnificent view of Kestrel Bay, if one didn’t mind steps overgrown with tufts of purple fumitory weeds and winds that nearly knocked you over as you climbed.
The air smelled like her childhood—like brine and sand and pollen. A heady, salty scent that made her ill at ease. She had come here to remember how that era of her life had ended, but now that she was here, every memory of it smarted.
Henri would be good for her. He would remind her who she had become, and distract from the relics of what she’d lost.
She ascended the steps carefully, wincing against the bright, flat glare off the Kestrel. At this time of day, the light hit the cliffs in such a blinding arc it was difficult to parse the sky from the sea.