After he had gone, Wesley and I sat in the small room, and I thought about Rhys, who had chosen my son over the truth, and about Zane, who had chosen the truth over his own comfort. A company is not only its boats and its books. It is the people who sit around its table, and who decide, in the quiet moments, whether to believe a lie or to wait for the truth. Zane had waited. He had doubted. And now he was helping, quietly, in the dark.
Chapter 18
— The Buyer Who Returned the Boats
I met Fenella Waverly on a Friday morning, in her office in Vienna, and I went alone, because this was a conversation that needed no witnesses. Wesley had found her address, and he had telephoned her secretary, and he had said only that a lady wished to discuss the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star, and the secretary had given us an appointment.
Her office was on the top floor of a building that looked out over the Danube, and she was a woman of about my own age, silver-haired, sharp-eyed, with the air of someone who had built her own fortune and did not apologise for it. She stood when I entered, and she looked at me, and her face went pale, and she said, "You are supposed to be dead."
"I am supposed to be many things," I said. "Dead is only the most recent. May I sit down?"
She sat down opposite me, and she did not offer tea, and for a moment neither of us spoke. Then I laid the folder on her desk, and I opened it, and I showed her the copies of the partnership agreement and the power of attorney, and I told her, calmly and plainly, what they said. The fleet could not be sold without both founders' signatures. One founder was dead. The other was sitting in her office. The power of attorney she had been shown covered medical decisions only. It did not cover the sale of boats. The sale of the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star had never been legal, and the boats had never been Landon's to sell.
Fenella read the documents twice, and then she put them down, and she looked out of the window at the river for a long time. When she turned back to me, her face had changed. The sharpness was still there, but beneath it there was something else: anger, and something that might have been shame.
"He told me you were dead," she said. "He came to me with a death certificate, or something that looked like one, and he told me the company needed money, and that the boats were surplus, and that you would have wanted them to go to someone who would care for them. He sold them to me for a fraction of their value, and I thought, at the time, that it was a bargain, and that a grieving son does not haggle. I did not ask enough questions. I should have asked more."
I believed her. I had expected a fight, and I had prepared for one, but what I found was a woman who had been deceived, and who knew it, and who did not like being deceived. She told me that the two boats were moored at a yard outside Vienna, and that she had not yet put them into service, because she had been waiting for the paperwork to be finalised, and because, if she was honest, something about the sale had troubled her from the start. The price had been too low. The haste had been too great. The son had been too eager.
"I will return them," she said, and she said it without hesitation, as if the decision had been waiting in her all along. "Both boats, the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star, returned to the Haversham Danube Line, in the condition in which I received them. I do not keep what was not honestly sold. And I will do more than that. When the hearing comes, I will stand up and I will tell them what Landon told me, and what he showed me, and what he charged me, and I will testify against him. He used me, and I do not forgive being used."
We talked for an hour after that, about the boats, about the river, about Nelson, whom Fenella had known slightly in the early years, and about the work of keeping old boats alive. She told me that the Wachau Queen's engine needed attention, and that the Vienna Star's paint was peeling, and that she had already ordered the work, at her own expense, because she had intended to care for them properly. She told me that she had no quarrel with me, and that she was sorry, and I told her that sorry was not necessary, because she had been lied to, and because she was putting it right.
Before I left, she walked me to the door, and she said, "Your son came to me as a grieving son, and I believed him. You have come to me as a living woman, and I believe you. There is a difference, and it is everything."
Wesley was waiting in the car below, and when I came out into the sunlight, I told him, and he sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, "Grandmother, the boats are coming home." I nodded, and I looked up at the building, at the windows that looked out over the Danube, and I thought about the two historic boats lying at a yard outside the city, waiting to be sailed back to Vienna, and about the woman who had bought them in good faith and was returning them in good faith, and about the hearing that was coming, and about the son who had sold his mother's fleet with a paper that was never his to use.