Daughter of the Deep(24)

‘Then what do you need me for?’

Hewett winces. I get the feeling he wishes he didn’t need me.

‘Miss – Prefect Dakkar,’ he says, seeing the intensity of my scowl, ‘in the last one hundred and fifty years, we have succeeded in re-creating only a few of your ancestor’s scientific advances. We have been like children playing dress-up in the great man’s clothes. Most of his work, I’m sorry to say, is still beyond our reach.’

‘And you think I can change that?’ I laugh, though there is nothing funny about it. Behind me, Socrates chatters in response. ‘Professor, I don’t have any family secrets.’

‘No,’ he agrees. ‘That was part of Nemo’s plan.’

Gem sits down next to me. His hand curls around the barrel of the Leyden gun. ‘Nemo’s plan?’

Hewett inhales, as if preparing himself for his final lecture. ‘Only two times did outsiders meet Captain Nemo and live to tell the tale. The first time –’

‘Was Land and Aronnax,’ Nelinha says. ‘The bad guys.’

Hewett musters a weary smile. ‘Yes, Miss da Silva. They would not, of course, call themselves bad guys. They fled from Nemo’s sub, the Nautilus, convinced that they had barely escaped the world’s most dangerous madman.’

‘An outlaw,’ I remember. ‘Caleb said we were protecting the legacy of an outlaw.’

‘Yes,’ Hewett says. ‘And Nemo was a bitter, dangerous outlaw. He hated the great colonial powers. He sank their ships across the globe, hoping to wreck their trade and bring them to their knees.’

Gem frowns. ‘So … nice guy.’

‘A brilliant scientist,’ Hewett counters, ‘who had personal reasons to hate imperialism.’ He hesitates, as if weighing whether or not he wants to tell me about yet another family tragedy. ‘During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Prince Dakkar stood up against the British. In response, the British destroyed his principality and killed his wife and elder son. After that, Dakkar went into hiding, eventually becoming Captain Nemo. You, Ana, are descended from his younger son, his only living heir.’

Nobody says anything for a minute. Even though the tragedy happened generations ago, I feel a familiar aching emptiness inside me, as if Nemo’s wife and child were two more people I lost when HP crumbled into the sea.

Finally Nelinha mutters an unkind comment in Portuguese about what imperialists can do with their national flags.

As far as I know, Dr Hewett doesn’t speak Portuguese, but he seems to understand the sentiment. He nods in sympathy.

‘At any rate,’ he says, ‘when Ned Land and Pierre Aronnax escaped the Nautilus, they were terrified by the captain’s rage and power. They made it their lives’ work to save the reigning world order from his agenda. They decided they could only do that by re-creating or stealing Nemo’s technology by whatever means necessary, claiming his power for themselves.’

Nelinha studies her nails, chipped from a hard day’s work braining enemies with her socket wrench. ‘So that’s where Land Institute came from. Like I said, the bad guys. They want to save the world order. What does that make us – the good-guy outlaws?’ She arches her eyebrows. ‘For the record, I’m okay with that.’

‘I’m so glad,’ Hewett says dryly. ‘As Prefect Dakkar deduced, our school was founded by the second group who encountered Nemo – the one led by Cyrus Harding and Bonaventure Pencroft. They had the good fortune of becoming stranded on an island that happened to be one of the captain’s secret bases. He helped them survive and eventually escape.’

‘He had a lot of secret bases?’ Gem asks, like he’s always wanted one.

‘A dozen that we know of,’ Hewett says. ‘Perhaps more. Anyway, by the time Harding and Pencroft met Nemo, he was a different man. His personal tragedies had left him broken and disillusioned. Despite being a genius, despite possessing the most powerful submarine ever built, he had failed to make any real change in the world … Or so he believed.’

‘He died in his sub.’ I didn’t realize how much I remembered about The Mysterious Island. I guess it feels different now, knowing that this guy shared my blood as well as my name. ‘Nemo helped the castaways escape. Then he sank the Nautilus in a subterranean lagoon or something, right before the island went up in a big volcanic explosion. The sub was his tomb.’

I can see the goosebumps ripple across Nelinha’s arms. For a genius engineer, she is pretty superstitious. Ghosts, dead people, tombs – that stuff totally freaks her out. ‘There wasn’t anything in that book about Harding and Pencroft starting a school,’ she says.

‘Of course not,’ Hewett says. ‘The only reason Harding and Pencroft spoke to Jules Verne was to change the public narrative. For our purposes, if anyone did begin to suspect that Captain Nemo was real, it was much better if they never saw him as a threat. By the end of his life, Nemo had given up his quest for vengeance. And, yes, he did die aboard the Nautilus, which was supposedly demolished in the destruction of his island.’

‘Our purposes,’ Gem says. ‘What are those?’

Hewett gestures at the map. ‘Just before Nemo died, he pulled Cyrus Harding aside and had some final words with him. It says that much in Verne’s book. What it does not say is that Nemo gave Harding a treasure chest of pearls and also entrusted him with a mission: to make sure his technology was never used by the world powers or stolen by Land Institute. We were to safeguard Nemo’s legacy, to reveal his advances only a little at a time, when we decided the world was ready for them. Most importantly –’ he looks at me – ‘we were to safeguard his descendants until the time was right.’