Chapter Text
'Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.'
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
'Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they're girls who do girls like they're boys'
Blur, 1994
‘What I don’t understand,’ Deryn said. ‘is why the hell I actually don’t find any of them all that interesting isn’t a good enough answer.’
‘You’re simply too dashing for your own good. I could have told you that. And apparently every girl under the age of twenty at the Zoo can as well,’ Alek said. The glowworm streetlamps illuminated their mild mid-summer walk home from the pub. Faint bioluminescence shimmered between the bricks that made up the road. London was never really all that dark.
Alek was enjoying Deryn’s dilemma more than he should have. He’d foreseen this problem, that girls at the Zoo would be charmed by Dylan and vie for his attention. He’d tried to tell her, but she’d dismissed the idea, claiming that Lilit had been far more interested in her as a girl than as a midshipman and that she’d told Deryn as much. Therefore, no girl had ever laid eyes on Dylan and found him attractive and it was safe to extrapolate that none ever would, and even if one poor girl did happen to develop feelings for Dylan, Deryn would be able to let her down gently.
It wasn’t one girl, though. It was most of them.
‘I think they’re trying to wind me up,’ Deryn said.
‘I fear they are not.’
Earlier this evening at the pub Deryn had been ambushed by several of the young men who worked and studied at the Zoological Society of London. The lot of them had just about had it with the grip that Dylan seemed to have on all the girls at the Zoo. He was the new shiny toy fresh off the famous Leviathan, a globetrotting airman with a soft spot for suffragettes, and all the young women of the Zoo seemed to be under a spell that caused them to care about no boy but him. Now, the men would appreciate it if Dylan would kindly pick one lucky lady to give his attention to so that the rest of his male coworkers could get back to spooning the other girls they worked with.
‘It’s some kind of mass hysteria,’ Deryn insisted. ‘What exactly is so appealing about one skinny working class lad from Glasgow to a bunch of posh career girls?’
‘Novelty,’ Alek suggested. ‘An airman’s swagger. Your beguiling nature.’
Deryn glared at him and Alek grinned back. He was having fun at Deryn’s expense, and he couldn’t even feel bad about it. Deryn, to whom everything came naturally and effortlessly, from free-ballooning to drawing to befriending men with whom she didn’t even share a language, was floundering at the prospect of girls being interested in her carefully constructed masculine persona. Deryn, who could improvise her way out of any sticky situation, was at a loss about something that Alek had seen coming a mile away. It felt good to be right, and it felt good in a much giddier sense to know that he was not the only one who found Deryn’s cool and competent demeanor so compelling. He couldn’t even find it in him to be insulted that they were all so fascinated by Dylan and not him.
‘I miss the air force,’ Deryn sighed.
‘Don't tell me you learned nothing from Lilit,’ Alek said.
‘That was different! None of the boys thought I was pretty enough to bother with when I was a girl, so I figured it would work the same way in reverse, with the exception of anarchist Toms.’
Alek thought it was more likely that boys had never paid attention to Deryn because they were intimidated by a girl who was better than them at skills they prided themselves on. He’d seen that dynamic plenty since starting at the Zoo, but he knew Deryn didn’t like being compared to the girls they worked with.
‘I think girls look for different qualities in boys than boys look for in girls,’ Alek said instead.
‘And I think that you don’t have a particularly good grasp on what boys like about girls, so I'm not taking your advice on what girls look for in boys.’
He shrugged.
‘I never said I shared those values.’ Alek smiled at her but Deryn was too busy plotting evasive manoevers to notice.
‘I'll have to just take a girl on a few dates to get everyone off my back,’ she said. ‘Who would be willing to go dancing a few times for a laugh and then not be disappointed when I break it off? You know them better than I do.’
It was true that Alek spent a lot more time with the young women who worked at the Zoological Society than Deryn did. Deryn spent most of her working hours following Dr Barlow around, passing information between boffins and the board of directors, and with fabricated beasts. Often Dr Barlow was the only woman around. Alek, on the other hand, spent most of his time in the research-focused Institute of Zoology and communications branch of the Zoo. Both departments were inhabited by plenty of middle class and minorly aristocratic girls deemed a little too bright to make good homemakers in their youth, and who had been sent off by their respectable families to either get this drive for independence out of their system or else make a career out of it.
Alek had never spent much time around girls his age outside of Lilit and Deryn, and they, with their respective careers as political revolutionary and airman, were hardly the same type of girl who usually found her way to the pillar of the British Empire that was the Zoological Society of London. Upon arriving in London six months ago Alek found himself suddenly surrounded by a dozen curious young women who all shared the defining characteristic of being clever. At work they talked about research methods, life threads, resurrecting megafauna, and fabricating more efficient pollinators and parasitoids, but once it was time for a coffee break the girls no longer wanted to talk about translations and taxonomy. Alek had polite social scripts to talk to them about trivial matters, but the girls had brushed past his prepared pleasantries by questioning him relentlessly about the Leviathan's recent circumnavigation of the globe.
‘Katherine Amesbury?’ Alek suggested. Katherine was an ambitious zoology student who Alek had initially found annoyingly bold but now quite liked. ‘She wouldn't take it personally.’
‘No, she wants Dr Barlow to supervise her research. She wouldn't risk an awkward situation with me if we're going to have to work together every day.’
‘You could tell her upfront that it's just to get everyone off your back.’
‘But then she'd be on my case about who I actually like. She's too nosy, she'd try to set me up with someone else.’
Katherine's nosy investigations were actually something Alek enjoyed about her company. She’d quickly cottoned on to the fact that Alek didn’t like being interrogated (or ‘being asked questions about himself,’ as she put it) and instead told him about her snooping on other people. But he saw the problem this posed for Deryn’s situation.
‘Tilly Lindfield,’ Alek offered.
‘She looks like a girl I really hated when I was in school.’
‘Alright. Mary Whitekirk.’
‘Can't. Her mum’s from Paisley. She might know someone who knows me.’
‘Brianna Somerton?’
‘No, she's annoying as a bag of lizards.’
Alek nodded.
‘That’s true. She told me the other day that women are better at weaving due to natural selection.’
Deryn made a disgusted noise.
‘Does she think the cotton gin was naturally selected, too?’
‘Clara Brackley,’ Alek tried again.
‘Who?’
‘Dr Walden's typist. She has red hair and she wears very long cardigans.’
‘Oh, her. About this tall?’ Deryn held her hand a bit below her shoulder.
‘Yes. Perhaps don't tell her that you didn't know her name until today. She's quite fond of you.’
‘I've talked to her a couple of times! I just didn't know her name. She seems nice. She's studying ornithology part time, right? And knits a lot?’
Alek nodded.
‘See, I know who she is! Her father’s an architect and he wanted her to do bookkeeping for the firm, but she was more keen on science. She'd read a bunch of science fiction by some French lad.’
Alek wondered how Deryn had gotten all that from a couple of conversations without even learning Clara’s name. He’d only just learned that Clara really liked knitting after talking to her most days for months. Perhaps this was why all the girls liked Dylan and not him.
‘She could work,’ Deryn was saying. ‘I reckon I could get along with her well enough.’
‘Then that's settled,’ Alek said. ‘Tomorrow you can take her out to lunch.’
‘Aye, and then break it off before I go bankrupt paying for two people's lunch every day.’
And so Dylan turned up to the Zoo on Friday morning and politely asked if he could have the pleasure of taking Clara out to lunch, an offer which she accepted gleefully. Alek made sure to spread the news amongst the others working on entomology identification alongside him that morning. The rest of the young women at the Zoo collectively rolled their eyes at Clara and Dylan walking arm in arm that afternoon and turned their attention back to the Eton-educated boys with less romantic tales of adventure. Alek and Deryn breathed a sigh of relief.
Clara was the first girl Deryn had spent much time with in quite a while, and unlike the girls she’d gone to school with, Clara had no reason to find fault in Deryn’s inability to be a proper girl. In fact, Deryn quite enjoyed Clara’s companionship, and would have liked to have her as a friend. Clara was a bit shy, but gradually she told Dylan that she collected maps of places she’s never been to and talked about the biophysics behind birds’ flight and how it differed from hydrogen breathers and insects. This had Deryn pulling out her sketchbook to make notes and diagrams, which Clara found positively charming. Clara was surprised but delighted to learn that Dylan knew some practical knitting skills and was quick to show off the maths she had done to expand on her mother’s intricate lacework knitting patterns.
‘It’s a bit daft that in order to be friends with a girl I had to start being a boy,’ Deryn told Alek one evening. They were sitting on Deryn’s narrow bed in Dr Barlow’s attic. ‘When I was a kid the other girls didn't like me much because I didn't dress or act like them. They always had to let me know that there was something wrong with me. But now that they don't expect me to be so sodding girlish I can just talk to them normally.’
‘That is odd,’ Alek said. He thought of all the ways his family used to let him know that there was something wrong with him. ‘But you're not friends with her, right? You're supposed to be keeping her company, in a romantic sense.’
‘Are we not friends, Alek?’ Deryn said, aghast. ‘All this time I thought we were friends.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Oh, you mean friends like this?’
Like this, Deryn gleefully demonstrated, was pinning Alek down and kissing him senseless.
‘Well,’ Alek said breathlessly between kisses. ‘I don't mind if you're not friends with Clara like this.’
Tragedy struck four months into the romance when Clara’s parents came to London for a visit. They were polite enough to Dylan, if cautious of his days as an airman, but they believed Clara to be a good judge of character and so of Dylan to have good intentions for their daughter.
All of the good will and blessings from Clara’s parents ground things to a rather abrupt halt and Alek and Deryn had to call an emergency after-hours meeting. Mrs Mitchell, the lady of the house where both Alek and Volger rented rooms, was not terribly pleased to see Dylan on her doorstep so late in the evening, but she let him in to see Alek with a promise that Dylan knew all the squeaky steps and would be quiet as a mouse on his way out.
Alek turned over the box of cigars that Deryn had been gifted by Clara’s father and examined the colourful label. Bovril made a grab for it, and Alek tossed the box back to Deryn and out of the loris’s reach.
‘It’s a nice gesture,’ Alek said
‘Aye, he said they were imported from Cuba.’
The cigars had a stronger smell than cigarettes. Alek didn’t think that the Mitchells would appreciate it infiltrating their rugs and drapes, so he opened the window. He and Deryn shared the crowded seat in the dormer by the window with their shins pressed against each other and considered the path ahead.
‘I have to end things now,’ Deryn said.
‘Surely not so fast.’ Alek frowned. ‘It’s not as if they gave you a timeline to get married.’
‘No, but the longer it goes on the angrier they’ll be.’
‘And I suppose if you tell her now you can say that after meeting her parents you realized that she deserves someone who will take the prospect of marriage seriously.’
‘Which will make me look like an arse, but at least an arse who knows it.’
‘Or a young man who came back from service recently and isn’t looking to settle down quite yet,’ Alek suggested. ‘It might make you seem considerate of her future.’
‘Not everyone is as charitable as the Mitchells,’ Deryn said with a sigh.
Alek rolled his eyes at this. The Mitchells had refused to charge Alek and Vogler for their rooms or meals, and Deryn liked to bring it up whenever she thought Alek’s previous social standing was clouding his judgement. He had tried to explain that what the Mitchells were doing was just common decency, seeing as he and Volger were political refugees who’d arrived in Britain without a penny to their names, but that wasn’t an easy argument to make when Dr Barlow was both paying Deryn’s wages and charging her rent for a drafty room in the attic of the Barlow house.
They set to drawing up an appropriate delivery of the bad news. Alek did most of the drafting, and it included polite sentiments of Dylan realizing that Clara deserved someone who would respect her (or at least someone who was less likely to fuck off to another part of the world without notice); of appreciating her time and the fun they’d had, and realizing that he preferred her company as a friend and wishing her well; of still having his mind halfway around the world and not wanting to disappoint her further when he had become more integrated into her life. Bovril helpfully contributed words whenever Alek was stumped.
Deryn admired Alek’s tidy cursive notes.
‘Barking spiders, you are good at diplomacy,’ she said admiringly. ‘If someone said this to me I’d walk away feeling better about myself.’
‘Thank you. I have a lot of experience disappointing people.’
Deryn laughed and pulled his legs over her lap.
‘This should satisfy the lads at work for a while,’ she said.
‘I hope so. It makes for rather dull evenings when you’re always taking a girl out dancing and she’s not even me.’
Despite Alek’s expertise, Clara was devastated. Deryn took her to a more secluded part of Regent’s Park after work to break the news to her. Her large lace-knit beret blocked her face from view as she sobbed into her hands. Deryn patted her shoulder awkwardly, but with every platitude Clara seemed more distraught.
They’d severely underestimated how invested Clara had been. Deryn shuddered as she recounted the scene to Alek that evening over another shared cigar. At this rate, the cigars wouldn’t last long.
Clara was not at work the next day, but a pile of maps that Deryn had lent her had found their way onto Deryn’s desk when she arrived. Word of Dylan’s blunder spread quickly, seemingly originating with Mary Whitekirk and Victoria Lavenham after they both gave Deryn disparaging looks when she and Alek arrived that morning. By lunch Deryn was taking on the noisiest, messiest jobs she could to have an excuse not to talk to anyone. Alek spent the evening in Deryn’s room, where they hid away from gossip and burned through a third cigar.
‘Girls never liked me when I was a kid,’ she whined while Alek listened patiently. ‘And even now that girls do like me they don’t like me.’
‘Perhaps none of the women at the Zoo will be interested in you after this. And you’ll be free of the whole matter,’ Alek suggested optimistically, but Deryn shook her head.
‘I wish that were true. James Crofton caught me on my way out and asked me if I was really done with Clara for good because Tilly was asking him what I think of her.’
‘And did you tell him that you think she looks like a girl who used to bully you?’
‘No, but maybe I should have. I'll bet none of these girls would want to talk to me if I was a real prick to them.’ She groaned and passed Alek the cigar in exchange for Bovril, who started rooting through Deryn’s pockets for leftover treats from her day of working with fabricated beasts.
‘That would be one solution. Or you could start spreading unpleasant rumours about yourself.’
‘Aye, I’ll bet we could come up with some unsavoury tales from the air force. We could start telling everyone that when we crash landed in the alps, I was the one who suggested that we eat the beasts to survive.’
‘I’m sure that would be very off-putting to young fabricators, but I don’t think it would be believable. You’re too fond of all the fabs you work with.’ He passed the cigar back to Deryn and took Bovril, turning out his pockets before Bovril could investigate.
‘Good point.’ Deryn blew smoke out the window. ‘We could tell them that I suggested cannibalism the moment we hit the glacier.’
‘Like those American frontiersmen who were stuck in the Sierra Nevada all winter! They all had to eat each other to survive.’
‘And you could say that I seemed barking disappointed when you said you had store rooms full of food.’
Alek laughed and for a wonderful moment they were free from the minefield of social politics at the Zoo. They debated who from the crew of the Leviathan and Alek's walker would have succumbed to cannibalism first, or rather second, because they agreed that Volger would be the first to suggest it. Deryn began to rummage through her bookshelf to find her Atlas with a detailed map of California and in the process she set aside a pile of papers onto the bed. The stack began to slide off the quilts, but Alek caught them before they could spill all over the floor. The folded sheet on top was a map of Japan. Below was a map of the Ottoman Empire.
‘Clara returned the maps I gave her,’ Deryn sighed. ‘Or I suppose she had someone bring them into work. They were on my desk this morning.’
‘Ottoman girls,’ Bovril said quietly.
Gears were turning in Alek’s head - or rather, synapses were firing, organic chemical reactions were going berserk.
‘Lilit,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘You can't be with any of the girls here because you’re still hopelessly in love with a girl you met in Istanbul, and you realized that when she unexpectedly sent you a letter. You wanted to let Clara down gently, because you know you’d want to be with this Ottoman girl if given the chance.’
‘And that would be Lilit?’ Deryn asked.
‘That would be Lilit. Do you think she would do it?’
Deryn shrugged.
‘She wouldn’t even have to know. We can write a fake letter from her dated last week,’ she suggested, but Alek shook his head.
‘She’s a diplomat now, and one more familiar with Darwinism than most Clankers. There’s a chance she’ll visit London, and if she does she would need to play her part. She has to be in on this.’
Deryn thought about it carefully.
‘You’re right. If I’m going to have a far away lass I can’t half-arse it. No one will believe one convenient love letter. I’ll need correspondence from her consistently. I’ve known plenty of lads who pretend to have a girl somewhere else, and no one ever believes it without hard evidence.’ Deryn dug a piece of stationary out of her desk.
‘But then I suppose we’re already too late. She didn’t send you a letter last week, and I can’t copy handwriting. Unless that's one of your hidden talents?’
‘No, I’ll ask her to write something dated last week.’ Deryn was writing furiously and Alek hoped that Lilit would be able to read her scrawl.
‘And if she doesn’t agree? After all, she was also in love with you. She might be hurt.’
‘She wasn’t in love, she was curious about kissing a boy who was a girl,’ Deryn said. ‘And if she says no, I reckon I have a good excuse to act dodgy for the next week or so anyway with how upset Clara is.’
They posted the letter via airmail the next morning and included a little change Alek scrounged up so that Lilit could send her letter back just as quickly. Deryn continued to take the noisiest and dirtiest tasks at work to avoid prying eyes and declined invitations to the pub where she would no doubt be accosted with questions about Clara. Alek laid low as well, first under the guise of comforting his friend, and then inventing important meetings and a fictional Catholic holiday to avoid an interrogation about Dylan’s love life disguised as a night on the town.
If Lilit agreed to the scheme she would solve more than one of their problems. Before Clara, the other young men at the Zoo had taken note of Alek and Dylan’s general lack of interest in girls and, combined with Alek’s very obvious discomfort around the blunt Darwinist approach to biology, there had been a comment here and there that the pair of them seemed a little too familiar with each other. And now Clara had apparently gone and told the other girls, who shared with their boyfriends respectively, what a gentleman Dylan had been with her, very respectful and not pushy in the slightest. After a week of Alek sidestepping questions about Clara and Dylan, Katherine Amesbury had very politely whispered to Alek that speculation had returned, seeing as Dylan and Clara’s entire romance ended without so much as a single attempt at unbuttoning Clara’s blouse.
But they weren’t serious accusations after all, just another way that the boys taunted and one-upped each other’s masculinity. They didn’t seem to bother Deryn much, who had rolled with all the punches that the other midshipmen had thrown and was used to having to defend herself as either gender. Alek had never envied that about her until now, as she batted away the jokes and snide remarks like a professional while he stumbled through the wake that Deryn left. He wasn't as quick with a clever retort as she was, and though the insinuations felt absurd given his and Deryn’s relationship, he couldn’t use that as a defence without compromising Deryn’s identity. Also, the snide comments had a very distant but still uneasy familiarity.
In the midst of the anger and betrayal Alek had felt upon learning that Deryn was a girl, he had also been rather relieved that his charming, handsome, and very loveable best friend was not a boy after all. He’d spent weeks ignoring the exact tone that his affection for Dylan had taken on, and in some ways Deryn’s lies had saved him from an unthinkable alternative. Not that he would ever have admitted this to anyone besides himself, and exclusively at early hours in the morning when he couldn’t sleep and it felt like morning would never come. At all other times of day the notion seemed preposterous.
It took ten days for Lilit’s response to arrive, and they were ten very long days.
Alek and Deryn eagerly ripped the envelope open and were satisfied to find two letters - one dated four days earlier, and another dated two and a half weeks before Deryn had dropped Clara. The envelope had the date stamped on it, so they wrapped the second letter carefully in a scarf that Alek had acquired in Istanbul. He had deemed the pattern on it too ostentatious for London, and so had never worn it around anyone from the Zoo.
The first letter read:
November 19, 1915
Istanbul
My dearest Dylan,
I cannot express how pleased I was to receive a letter from you. And about time too! I am more than happy to play an active role in your deception. In fact, I am flattered that you thought of me for such a task. While I’m sure Alek is playing his part as well as he can, I know from experience that I am a much better actor than he is and should be able to add some more convincing airs to your story. Actually, my apologies to Alek, that wasn’t very nice of me. Please send him my warmest regards.
I’ve included a letter dated October 21 as requested, in which I profess my undying love to you and how desperately I’ve missed you and how I long to reunite and so on and so forth. I hope it will be sufficient to convince your colleagues that you are too busy pining in a cross-hemispherical romance to become involved with any charming English ladies no matter how good at knitting they are.
The rest of the letter caught them up to speed on Lilit’s life in Istanbul now that she had finished up with her position in America, and how she was learning to be a little more tactful at playing the long game in politics. She threw in a riddle from Nene as well.
‘I've gotten much better at lying since she last saw me,’ Alek huffed.
‘Aye, and you’re welcome for that.’
The tone of the second letter abandoned Lilit’s usual pragmatism and wit for dripping honey.
October 21, 1915
Istanbul
My beloved Dylan,
Although I have resisted for many months, I have found myself unable to continue my silence. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you and our sublime days together cut short by this dreadful war. In these more peaceful times in Istanbul I find myself longing for your arms, for you to hold me with the strength to hold an airship down. I think of the days we spent in the markets, the sweet pastries we ate by the fountains, lost in the pools of your eyes…
It carried on in this fashion for two pages, full of events that had never happened and syrupy, pastel prose.
‘God’s wounds,’ Alek said. His eyes watered from the perfume that Lilit had doused the letter in. ‘Do you think it’s too much?’
‘It’s what we’ve got.’ Deryn grimaced. ‘And I reckon she did that on purpose.’
She didn’t sound as certain of the plan as she had before.
The next day Deryn finally agreed to come to the pub to drown her sorrows. She had folded and unfolded Lilit’s sugary letter many times the night before to make it flimsy, as if she’d been reading it over and over again for several weeks. Once beers were in hand, the other men pounced. Had Clara's knitting become tiresome? Was she too dull? Had she not put out? Had she put out too soon? Had she been unhygienic? Did she have too many strong opinions? Was her family horrible?
‘Course not,’ Deryn said. Clara’s knitting was fascinating. She knew about many subjects. She was a pleasant conversationalist. She had been perfectly respectable but also fun. She was clean. Her family was lovely. ‘It was none of those things, lads. And I feel like a right arse for having strung her along when I knew…’
Deryn looked down at her beer and sighed, then glanced at her captive audience. The men were riveted. Alek, who knew exactly what she would say next, tried without much difficulty to look appropriately enthralled.
‘The truth is, I got a letter from a girl I knew in Istanbul. Lilit, that’s her name. We had been… well, we had been proper close during the time I spent there. She wasn't my first, but she was the first girl I really cared about, you know? And I was her first.’
Deryn glanced around her audience for the consensus that yes, there was something special about a young man's first love but not first fuck and a young woman's first both. Seeing the correct response from the crowd, she continued, ‘Once I left I figured I would never see her again. I felt dead rotten about it. Alek can tell you, I was miserable for weeks, all across Asia. But that's war, isn't it? So I moved on, I decided there would be other women out there. Got here and started keeping Clara company, and thought I’d really got something good.’
Again, Deryn paused, this time to light a cigarette and let anyone doubtful see Alek corroborating the story by nodding along to confirm that Dylan had been absolutely devastated all across Asia.
‘Now, I don’t know how she managed it, but Lilit got ahold of my address here and wrote to me a few weeks ago. And, to be honest, I should have broken it off with Clara then and there, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about Lilit from that moment on. But I didn’t. I thought Istanbul is too far, and I should just be happy that I’ve got Clara, because she really is a sweet girl and I was lucky to have her. And then…’ Deryn shook her head in dismay. ‘Then I met Clara’s parents. I realized how it wasn’t right at all, that Clara deserves someone who really loves her, her parents deserve a lad who’s going to be devoted to her, and I, well… I just can’t stop thinking about Lilit.’
They descended on Deryn like hawks. She fielded their questions and when doubt was cast on the legitimacy of the tale she produced Lilit’s letter, heavily perfumed with orange and spices. She passed it around the table along with the scarf. The men were, for the most part, appropriately impressed by the love letter, though a few remained skeptical of the story. Alek wasn’t concerned by this, as Lillit had agreed to continue to write fanciful love letters every week or so for the foreseeable future, as long as he and Deryn pitched in for the postage.
‘Can’t say I’d be happy with that arrangement,’ Harry muttered. ‘How do you know she’s not going round with other men while writing you this shit?’
‘Aye, but with all my travels on the Leviathan, I’m used to being far away from loved ones and having to rely on faith,’ Deryn said wistfully.
‘Like Penelope and Odysseus,’ Alek added helpfully.
‘Didn’t realize you were such a romantic.’ Harry elbowed Deryn, who smiled dreamily into her beer.
Teddy was less convinced.
‘Personally I wouldn’t put much stock in the faithfulness of a girl who spends her time running about with landlocked airmen. How do you even know you were her first?’ he said.
‘Lilit was closely involved in the revolution in Istanbul. She is very respectable, and very reliable,’ Alek insisted.
‘Reliably found in a pub, probably,’ Bill scoffed. And here Deryn and Alek played a careful balancing act of portraying Lilit as intelligent enough to be a successful revolutionary and proper enough to be worthy of Dylan’s time, but also fun enough to not cast doubt on Dylan’s manliness. Deryn and Alek remained steadfast until the interrogating eye is turned to Alek and his own experience, or rather lack thereof, during his time in Istanbul.
‘You were still a bloody prince then! What do you mean you didn’t have a single girl there?’ Lucas demanded. Alek’s face coloured.
‘I was working with revolutionaries. They don’t like aristocrats on principle,’ he defended himself meekly.
‘The working girls don’t give a rat’s ass who you are as long as you pay,’ Teddy cried. Alek muttered something about spending all the money he had on the revolution, which sent the other boys into the uproar.
‘And here I thought all the aristocrats only cared about politics because holding office opens legs, but I think we’ve found the exception,’ Harry shouted overtop of Bill’s insistence that Alek surely could have borrowed Lilit for one night at least, and Alek’s indignant reply was drowned out by riotous laughter.
‘Oi, oi, give the lad a break!’ Deryn came to Alek’s defence. ‘He was barely fifteen, he’d just found out he was heir to a throne, and up until then he’d had tutors instead of friends. He barely knew how to talk to girls in the first place. He’s learning now!’
They didn't cut him any slack, instead revelling in a competition to see who could make Alek the most uncomfortable. It wasn't the first time they'd played this game, where Alek felt like he was a football being kicked around by his peers as they regaled detailed descriptions of breasts they'd seen and sexual escapades they'd undertaken. He was getting better at managing his reactions, now that he wasn't caught off guard by it, but they could still make him blush and squirm in his seat. It was that much worse because Deryn was there. He wasn’t sure if it was better or simply even more embarrassing when she told them to leave off.
Once they got bored with putting Alek under a microscope, they turned back to Deryn and began questioning the depth, so to speak, of Dylan’s relationship with Lilit. Crucially, how many times? Deryn’s initial estimate of how many times they’d done it got chopped down repeatedly as the other boys insisted that fingers didn’t count and hands didn’t count and mouths didn’t count, until finally Harry and Bill were arguing about whether it really counted if the man pulled out before finishing.
‘They’re all bumrags, the lot of them,’ Deryn said as they walked home. She shook off her sleeve, which Harry had spilled beer all over while arguing against pulling out.
Alek was inclined to agree. Still, Deryn never seemed embarrassed by the things they talked about in the pub. Alek didn’t know if that was very good acting on her part or due to some Darwinist lack of shame.
‘Exactly how far is a girl supposed to go to not ruin her man's reputation but also keep her own?’ Deryn continued. ‘There’s no winning!’
Right. She meant Lilit.
‘It was perfectly disgusting how they talked about her,’ Alek said, as if he’d been on the same page the whole time.
Their plan worked brilliantly for the better part of a year. Lilit continued to send love letters to Dylan every week or so with actual letters to Deryn and Alek stuffed into the same envelope. No one seemed to notice when her professions of love got a little repetitive, or included verses of poetry that Sappho had certainly written about a woman.
It was nice to be back in regular contact with Lilit. Alek had missed her acerbic sense of humour and political observations. This, Alek imagined, was what it would be like to have a sibling. To have a sister who was a couple of years older than him and who shared many of his interests in history and technology and social progress, and also dished out relationship advice that he insisted he didn't want but would miss sorely if it were to stop. She recommended books to him by Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, and Colette, and he wrote back what he thought of them and told her about the gothic novels he had been enjoying lately. She advised him to read Sappho’s poetry in the original Greek rather than any translation that would obscure her intent. He also liked being able to discuss theology with Lilit, especially since he had yet to find a church in London that didn't seem to be fueling Monkey Luddite ideologies. Despite having grown up in vastly different sects of Christianity, he and Lilit's religious upbringings shared enough when compared to the Godless United Kingdom.
Over the next many months the girls at the Zoo accepted that Dylan was off the market, and Alek only had to deal with some light ribbing every now and then about his total inexperience and naivety, which wasn't even particularly true anymore, but it was the kind of taunting that he could ignore easily. Then Lilit sent word that she was going to be in London for a couple of months in the spring on a diplomatic visit to rebuild bridges between Britain and the Ottoman Empire after Churchill’s betrayal. Very suddenly Lilit and Dylan’s romance needed to become convincing beyond dainty love letters.
‘We could just break it off now and tell everyone it wasn't working,’ Deryn suggested as she reread Lilit’s most recent letter.
‘But you two won’t be able to simply be friends while she’s here,’ Alek said. ‘You either have to convince everyone that you're a couple, or you'll have to be distant and awkward around each other the whole time.’
Deryn sighed and ran her hand through her hair.
‘Maybe we should have just made up a fake girl,’ she said.
‘If you can pull off a believable romance while she’s here then you can keep it going after she’s left and not have to come up with new excuses,’ Alek pointed out. The plan was working so well, after all, and Lilit’s visit would only be a hiccup in the grand scheme of Deryn’s years-long deception.
‘True enough. I reckon that makes sense in the long term if Lilit’s up for it.’
Alek nodded. He did not mention that he found the accusations of excessive innocence much easier to manage than the accusations of homosexuality, however unserious they might have been. It didn't really seem fair to bring that up considering what he was suggesting Deryn do.
‘Alright Lilit, you wanted to kiss an airman who's a girl. Now's your chance.’ Deryn began scribbling a response.