This is for Noël, who borrowed $30 from me in a bookstore to buy the entire series at once.
Good taste is its own reward.
The gaslights in their brackets cast a warm glow over the secondhand oak escritoire – natural oak, not fabricated, a tactful flat-warming gift from the Head Keeper of the London Zoo to a pair of Austrian immigrants with whom she expected to enjoy (as the accompanying note had explained) a copious and fruitful correspondence. Count Volger had delegated to Alek the task of composing a gracious reply and ever since he had spent a good hour each day at the desk answering such letters as the count deemed worthy of his ward's personal attention. (Bills and appointments Volger handled himself; the scrawls of fans and poison pens were forwarded to the fire.) With the last of today's envelopes addressed and sealed, Alek leaned back in his chair and stretched, cracking his knuckles above his head. Then he placed a clean sheet of foolscap on the blotter, dipped his pen in the inkwell and prepared to practice his new signature.
His command of the Roman script preferred by Englishmen was improving, but his fingers still preferred to shape the German characters drilled into them by his first tutor, whose good reports of his penmanship had so pleased his mother. (Zeig' mir dein Buch, lieber Aleksandar – ah, siehe die schöne Buchstaben, gleich wie Herr Stumpf gesagt hat!) The metal nib sputtered as Alek drove it across the page; grimacing, he lifted it from the sheet before it could burp out a blot. His mother had not lived to be disappointed in him, God rest her soul, but he did not lack opportunities to embarrass his guardian, as Volger never failed to note. Or, for that matter, himself. Siehe das edele Dummkopf! Setting his teeth, Alek adjusted his grip on the barrel of the pen and began a new line: A ... l ... e ... x ...
Doctor Barlow had suggested the change, of course. Volger had disapproved, greeting this latest start with the same objections he'd raised to Alek's volte-face over the imperial succession, the renunciation of his Austrian titles, his acceptance of British citizenship – to everything, in short, that threatened to entangle them more closely with the godless Darwinists of the Zoological Society of London. (And with Deryn Sharp, though Volger ignored her just short of the cut direct these days.) "Have you lost all pride in your heritage?" he'd asked, his tone implying that it was more likely Alek had lost his wits.
Alek had shrugged. His heritage had brought him little joy; though he still admired the most admirable of his forebears, he took more pride in his own deeds, few though they were, than in theirs. "If it suited the Windsors to make a change," he'd answered, "what shame is in it for me?"
Volger's sneer had been eloquent of his estimation of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha vís-à-vís the House of Habsburg. "God forbid I see you a Protestant heretic next," he'd said, blessing himself, and there the matter had rested.
Alek had been relieved. Truth be told, he shared his mentor's wariness about accepting Doctor Barlow's counsel. She and the Society had done so much to aid them, asking (as yet) so little in return, that the yoke of obligation weighed uneasily on Alek's neck. But in this matter as in most he could not deny the doctor's perspicacity. Anglicizing his name would signal his commitment to his new homeland and shield him from casual (knee-jerk, in the curious Darwinist idiom) anti-Clanker sentiment. Better still, it would distance him from the lurid reputation with which Eddie Malone's articles had endowed Aleksandar von Hohenberg. Your ticket to anonymity, Doctor Barlow had called his deed poll, provided you confine your future appearances in the press to the society pages.
Even Volger concurred in that recommendation.
Distracted, Alek stumbled over the capital H of his surname, his pen wandering below the line. He struck the half-formed letter out with a muttered curse and rewrote it correctly. Was it this difficult for Deryn when she joined the Leviathan? he wondered. Had she labored over her signature and blotted the page to hide her errors? Somehow he doubted it: she'd been thoroughly Dylan on the airbeast, even her hand a convincingly boyish scribble. Alek hadn't thought to ask her when last they'd met, kicking their heels in the anteroom to Doctor Barlow's office at the Zoo; selfishly, he'd been more interested in hearing her opinion of his new name.
"'Alexander Highmount'?" she'd said. "Still sounds dead posh."
"You think so?" he'd asked. They'd been sitting shoulder to shoulder on the padded bench beneath the west-facing windows, Bovril draped around his neck to soak up the rich afternoon sunshine.
She'd grinned. "Nobody'd mistake you for a commoner, your ex-princeliness."
"Dead posh," the perspicacious loris had agreed in his right ear.
Alek hadn't intended that and hoped his new style didn't make him seem a snob. "But I am quite common now."
Deryn had shaken her head. "Never you," she'd said, her grin softening into something warmer and shyer, then firming again as she'd dug him in the ribs with her elbow. "Clankers don't know how to change their spots."
"But we can build new machines from old parts," he'd retorted, "and even adapt them to work with your fabrications."
At that, Bovril had sat upright and placed a paw on the crown of his head. "Alexander Highmount adapts," the loris had declared in the tone Doctor Barlow employed when she wanted no more argument from her children or her personal assistant.
"Says you!" Deryn had replied and Alek had stifled a grin of his own. No one quelled Deryn Sharp without an argument. "I'm the expert on adaptation here!"
Which was true in more senses than one. Not only had Deryn been raised a Darwinist, but she had also fabricated a decorated officer in the British Air Service from a fatherless girl. That should have been change enough for a lifetime, but evolution, unlike providence, recognized no endpoints. Under Doctor Barlow's tutelage, ex-Midshipman Dylan Sharp was undergoing a slower, subtler transformation into D. Sharp, a scientific illustrator for the Zoological Society, whom unthinking chauvinists might someday be startled to discover was a woman. "Someday," she'd sighed. "The lady boffin says I'll be wearing trousers till everyone forgets Middy Sharp ever existed."
The sigh had been equivocal, as much for the loss of the trousers as the delay. "I won't forget," Alek had answered, taking her hand. Deryn was his first love, but Dylan had been his first friend. He wouldn't have traded the one for the other and, thank God, he hadn't needed to. "I couldn't forget."
Her strong fingers had returned his clasp, as close to an embrace as this semi-public venue permitted. "Thanks, Alek."
"Trousers," Bovril had remarked, abruptly swarming down Alek's arm, across their joined hands, and up to Deryn's shoulder. "Miss Deryn Sharp."
"Aye, beastie," Deryn had replied, rubbing the underside of the loris's muzzle with the back of one finger so that the creature's eyes lidded contentedly, "but that's still a secret for now."
A secret, Count Volger had once warned Alek, which your continuing ... association puts at risk. If you wish Miss Sharp well, you will leave her to Doctor Barlow's care. The doctor herself never hindered their meetings: Alek and Deryn crossed paths freely and frequently at the Zoo. But she, too, had intimated that Dylan Sharp's adventures on the Leviathan would recede more quickly from the public mind were he not seen too often in the company of a young man whose own tenure aboard the airbeast had been extensively chronicled in the popular press. Society will retain its interest in you, Mr. Highmount, and in your friends. Choose them wisely.
As if his brief partnership with Nikolai Tesla hadn't taught Alek that, as well as the strength of his affection for Deryn. "And you've learned how to keep a secret, haven't you, Bovril?" he'd asked.
The loris had opened one eye at the sound of its name. "Alexander Highmount," Bovril had said, and then, on a rising inflection, "Alek?"
"Yes," he'd answered. "I'm still Alek."
At least, he hoped so.
He set down his pen, propping his head in his hands, and stared at the page before him until the letters blurred into a nonsensical mass. Aleksandar von Hohenberg had been many things: a prince and a fugitive and a revolutionary and a waste of hydrogen and a hero and fool – mostly a fool, but a lucky one, to have found his way through the Great War to this quiet West Hampstead flat. Alexander Highmount was only a name yet, but his own man, God willing, and not merely the Zoological Society's creature. Alek ... was the bridge between them, perhaps.
Lifting his head, Alek spread his hands and examined them. Though he'd lost his pilot's calluses, the marks of foil and pen remained. What use would Alexander Highmount make of those? Alek could not say, but he hoped that once he had fully adapted to this new world, he'd be able to offer Deryn a hand, and a name, in which they could both take pride.
Smiling absently, he dipped his pen into the inkwell and began with a firm downstroke to form the letter D.
Author's Note: Zeig' mir dein Buch, lieber Aleksandar – ah, siehe die schöne Buchstaben, gleich wie Herr Stumpf gesagt hat! translates as Show me your book, dear Aleksandar – ah, see the lovely letters, just as Herr Stumpf said! and Siehe das edele Dummkopf! as See the noble idiot!