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office.”
    Sick to his stomach, Verne pushed himself away from the table.   “I need to be excused, Father.”   He hurried up the narrow stairs to the room he shared with his younger brother.  
    He opened the shutters to let in the moist air.   Outside his window, the tall masts of sailing ships in port rose like towering trees.   How could his father be so dismissive of other people’s lives?   Verne felt trapped at home.   He looked out toward the empty dock that had held the unfinished Cynthia ; now nothing remained except a few protruding boards from her sunken hull, burn marks, and soot.
    Despite his father’s confidence, Verne’s life appeared to be a dead-end path.   He would never leave France, never have adventures and explore the world as his fictional heroes did.   And now, André Nemo -- who had always shared his enthusiasm, creativity, and energy with Verne -- had lost everything.   Where would he go?   How would his friend survive?
    Verne could sneak him food and clothes for a time, and Nemo would certainly find his own solution before long.   Verne just hoped he himself could be part of it.   Together, they had dreamed and imagined so much . . . yet now prison doors were slamming shut around them.
    It was the dark edge of twilight, and Paul hadn’t come upstairs to bed yet.   Verne threw himself on the blankets and lay wide awake, smelling the river fog, listening to the ship bells and groaning timbers and creaking ropes.   The water and the ships called to him like a distant siren song.  
    From the fourth-story window, his view of the masts was unobscured.   Any one of those vessels could guarantee him passage away from this sedentary place.   In his imagination, many times he had climbed into their riggings, raised himself to their crows’ nests, gripped the yardarms to hear the tug and flap of wind-stretched sails.   Did he have the nerve to make those dreams real?
    Ships came and went at all times, departing for far-off lands and returning with exotic treasures.   But Verne had to stay in Nantes, confined in his little room in his family’s narrow house in a tiny provincial town.  
    Didn’t he?
    Miserable, Verne managed to fall asleep before his brother came up to join him.
     

    v

     

    Nemo needed her help, more than ever in his life.   Caroline Aronnax vowed to do everything in her power to assist the young man who had so inflamed her imagination and unleashed her own dreams.   She had to keep his precious imagination alive.
    Before she’d met André Nemo and Jules Verne, Caroline had never considered spending time with two young men of such different social stations.   But from the first moment they had talked together in the market, she’d been captivated by both of them.
    Two months ago, all three had bumped into each other in front of a silversmith’s shop, listening to the shrunken old man dicker with a sailor for coral pieces to use in new jewelry.   Her maidservant Marie had been dealing with a pottery-seller for a new vase, and Caroline had heard Nemo and Verne discussing far-flung ports and island chains, eyeing the sailor’s coral as if it were splinters of the true cross.  
    Thanks to her father’s merchant fleet, Caroline knew all about the Canary Islands and ports in India, Madagascar, Ceylon.   She corrected the boys’ breathless misconceptions, surprising both of them.   They had talked together for a full hour while Marie flirted with the pottery-seller.
    Nemo had sensed a kindred spirit in the strawberry-blond young woman and boldly invited her to join them in a night-time escapade, exploring back streets and quays where no one else could see.   He whispered that they might even creep aboard an empty ship on the Loire docks.   Caroline had promised to join them at the appointed time, giving a daring glance to her maidservant. . . .
    Marie, skeptical but bright-eyed to assist her mistress in this little intrigue (after Caroline reminded Marie