He left, and I sat alone in the small room with the bank records spread out before me. The logbook had shown me the lie. The bank records had shown me where the lie went. Together, they were a rope, and I intended to use it to pull my company back from the edge of the river.
Chapter 15
— The Locked Cabinet
There is a cabinet in the company's archive in Vienna that has been locked for as long as I can remember, and I hold the only key. It is a heavy oak cabinet, built into the wall of the archive room, and inside it are the two documents on which the entire Haversham Danube Line rests. But on the Monday after Wesley found the bank records, I went to the archive before dawn, and I opened it, and I took out the papers that would decide whether my company could be saved.
The archive is in the basement of the company's offices, a long room with a low ceiling and shelves that run from floor to ceiling, filled with the paper history of forty years. The cabinet stands at the far end, between two shelves of bound volumes, and when I put the key in the lock it turned smoothly, as if it had been waiting. Inside, on the top shelf, lay a leather folder, and in the folder were two documents, each in its own envelope, each sealed with wax that had never been broken.
The first was the partnership agreement. Nelson and I had signed it in the first year of the company, in the office of a solicitor in Vienna who has long since retired, and it said, in plain language that no lawyer could twist, that the Haversham Danube Line was founded by two partners, Theodora Haversham and Nelson Haversham, and that the fleet could not be sold, in whole or in part, without the signatures of both founders. After Nelson's death, the agreement passed to me as the surviving founder, and its meaning had never changed: no one could sell a boat, let alone two boats, without my signature. Not my son. Not the board. Not anyone.
The second was the power of attorney. I had signed it years ago, in a hospital room in Vienna, when I was ill and frightened and the doctors were talking about an operation, because the solicitor had told me it was sensible: someone needed to be able to make medical decisions for me if I could not make them for myself. It was a limited power of attorney. It said so on the first page, in words I had read myself before I signed it: medical decisions only. It did not cover money. It did not cover property. It did not cover the sale of boats. I had signed it, and I had put it in the cabinet, and I had forgotten about it, because I had recovered, and I had never needed it again.
Landon had not forgotten about it. He had found it, or he had found a copy of it, and he had used it as if it gave him the right to sell the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star to Fenella Waverly, and he had told the board and the buyer that it gave him the authority of the founder herself. It did not. It never had. The original was here, in my hands, in the cabinet that only I could open, and it said, plainly and finally, what it was and what it was not.
Wesley was waiting upstairs, and when I carried the folder up to the small room and laid the two documents on the table beside the logbook and the bank records, he read them slowly, twice, and then he looked up at me, and he said, "Grandmother, this ends it. The sale was never legal. The boats were never his to sell. The fleet cannot be sold without both founders' signatures, and one of the founders is dead, and the other is sitting in this room."
I nodded, and I thought about the cabinet, and about the key I wore on a chain beneath my blouse, and about how Landon had built his whole plan on the belief that I was dead and that no one would ever open that cabinet again. He had sold the boats with a paper that did not give him the right, and he had told the board that I had drowned, and he had counted on the cabinet staying locked forever, with the truth inside it, gathering dust in the dark.
"We make copies," I said. "Proper copies, certified, so that the originals stay safe. And then we put the originals back in the cabinet, and we lock it, and I keep the key, and when the hearing comes, we bring the copies and we show them what the law actually says."
Wesley took the documents to a solicitor that afternoon, a careful man who read them in silence and then said that the partnership agreement alone would undo the sale, and that the power of attorney, read honestly, would undo Landon's claim to have acted for me. He made the copies, and he certified them, and he sealed the originals in fresh envelopes, and I carried them back to the archive and put them in the cabinet and turned the key, and I stood there for a moment in the quiet of the basement, listening to the river through the walls.