Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [47]
Verne read and reread the printed letters, hoping he had misunderstood. But there was no mistaking the stark words: Lost with all hands.
“Now, son, are you not glad I withdrew you from your foolish venture? You would be dead now, sunk by a storm or some enemy attack, just like that Nemo boy.”
But Verne, with a leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach, only mumbled, “All hands lost.” The words swam before his eyes.
“Yes, you’d be at the bottom of the ocean. And I’d be training your brother Paul to carry on my practice.”
“Thank you . . . for letting me know, Father.” Verne walked away on rigid legs, barely able to restrain himself from galloping out of the office. With his long legs and big feet, he’d probably trip and fall on his face. He left the door wide open as he staggered into the bright sunlight.
Caroline . . . he had to find Caroline. Nemo dead?
When he told her the news, standing without ceremony on the doorstep of Monsieur Aronnax’s row house, she wept bitterly. Her father would no doubt bring her the same message when he returned from his merchant offices. After all, he had recommended Captain Grant, had arranged for Nemo to be taken aboard as a cabin boy.
The stricken look on her heart-shaped face told him how much she had been waiting and hoping for Nemo’s return. He caught at her hands. “I’ll be here, Caroline. I’ll take care of you. I . . . I’ll always love you.”
“Ah, poor André!” She pulled away, blinking in shock. “Nothing will ever be the same.”
“I just want --” he said.
“Please, Jules. I need to be alone now.” Fresh tears ran unchecked from her beautiful eyes as she closed the door softly in his face.
iv
Inside the completed cave dwelling -- which he called Granite House -- Nemo sat in the dim light of goat-tallow candles and listened to the winter storm outside. He had called this place home for two years now. The comfortable wicker chair, painstakingly woven from cane, reeds, and grasses, creaked under his weight as he sat pondering at the driftwood writing table.
He had done everything by himself, thinking up ideas, designing the pieces, and implementing them. When a concept failed, sometimes disastrously, Nemo went back to his ruminations, his scrawled plans, and refigured the math and the engineering. Captain Grant had taught him the fundamentals, and Nemo had learned the rest by trial and error. Luckily, he had lived through the errors. . . .
He opened his weathered journal and smoothed down the central cut made by the noseless pirate captain’s cutlass. He glanced over the pages of densely written words that documented his time marooned on the island, his schemes, his failures. Nemo had lived through storms, earthquakes from the restless volcano, attacks from wild animals, even a lightning-sparked forest fire that had raged across a section of the island.
Now he dipped the sharpened end of a quill feather (from an albatross he’d shot with a hand-made arrow) into a baked-clay pot of ink (made from the distilled excretions of certain shellfish). He kept the record for his own sanity. Every day seemed so much the same, week after week, month after month. . . .
Because he didn’t know how many blurry days he had been cast adrift from the Coralie, Nemo was no longer sure of the exact date. He had, however, come up with a close approximation by making his own instruments and using pebbles and shadows on the beach to mark the sun’s passage along the ecliptic. Thus, he had determined the summer and winter solstices, and by measuring the angle of the southern cross in the sky, he had derived an estimate of his latitude, not that it did him any good. He had no charts and could not pinpoint where the mysterious island might lie in the South China Sea, though he must be far from any well-traveled shipping lanes.
Now the wind howled past the cave opening on the cliff face. Rain lashed down, pelting the rocks and filling Nemo’s