Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [143]
Two years after they were married -- five years after he had left France for the Crimea -- beautiful Auda bore him an infant boy who became the bright light in Nemo’s life. After the birth, her face drawn with the effort and her silky hair streaked with sweat, Nemo found his wife more beautiful than ever. In that moment he realized that he had indeed come to love Auda.
Looking back over everything he had lost, Nemo took comfort in this one thing: at least he had gained her. As he remembered his childhood and the happy days in Nantes, he held the baby son in his arms and smiled.
“We will name him Jules,” he said.
iii
Long after the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War, soldiers continued to trickle home from the Black Sea battlefields. They were a sorry sight, wounded in mind and body, completely without the songs or hurrahs they had carried in their hearts when they’d gone off to war.
But André Nemo was not among them. Month after month, he did not come home, nor did he send any word. He had vanished somewhere in the war.
Preoccupied with his new family, his struggles as a writer, and his daily work in the stock market, Jules Verne spared only an occasional thought for his old friend. He and Honorine, with her two daughters, traveled to Nantes for a spring holiday, where Verne ate well of his mother’s cooking. In Paris, their personal finances had been tight, as always.
During the visit home, he held the usual brief conversations with his father while reading the newspapers and reviewing the events of the day. The “Iron Tsar” Nicholas I had died the year before, leaving the country in the hands of his more open-minded son Alexander. Autocratic Russia had grudgingly resigned her protectorate over the Orthodox Church in Turkey, and the great Sultan of the Ottoman Empire promised privileges for his Christian subjects. The Black Sea became a neutral body of water, and the world began to settle down.
France’s Parliament engaged in heated discussions about the outrageous ineptitude of the military bureaucracy during the conflict. Others challenged Emperor Napoleon III’s clumsy foreign policy that had unnecessarily drawn France into the war in the first place. In Britain, the outspoken reformer Florence Nightingale used official records and damning statistics to show that of the 100,000 fatalities in the Crimea, fully a quarter of them had died of disease, exposure, and lack of supplies rather than from battlefield injuries. Inexcusable.
Tennyson’s scathing but heroic poem immortalized the Light Brigade’s senseless and futile charge against murderous odds. The victims -- “Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or die” -- became symbols for the confusion and tragedy of the Crimean War. . . .
Thus, by virtue of his brief vacation in Nantes, Verne was at his old house when the terrible message came from the French war department.
When enlisting years earlier, Nemo had written down the names of Jules Verne and Caroline Hatteras as ‘next of kin.’ The war department letter, identical to so many others, gave few details aside from the stark announcement that André Nemo had been killed at the battle of Balaclava. According to military records, he had been buried with other brave soldiers outside Sevastopol. He had left no personal effects.
Standing in the doorway, Verne held the official communiqué with trembling hands. While arranging flowers in a vase in the back room, Honorine watched him blocking the sunlight, observed her husband’s reaction as he opened the note and read the words. She came forward, grasping the flowers in her hand, as she instinctively tried to comfort him. Instead, Verne walked in a daze away from his father’s old