Kieran arrived in Vienna on a bright, cold morning, stepping off the train with a small bag in one hand and his cap in the other, looking around the station as if he expected the city to swallow him whole. I had sent a car for him, but he had insisted on walking from the station to my house, and when he arrived at my door, his cheeks were pink with the cold and his eyes were bright with the pleasure of the walk. He had never been to Vienna before, he told me, and he had spent the whole journey staring out of the train window at the river, watching it widen and change as it came toward the city.
I had prepared tea in the small sitting room that looks out over the garden, and we sat there for an hour, talking the way old friends talk, about nothing in particular and everything at once. He told me about the lock, and the boats that had passed through it since I left, and the young engineer who had come to learn the work. I told him about the company, and the foundation, and Wesley's first weeks as operations director. It was ordinary talk, and it felt like a gift after everything that had happened. There are conversations that heal you simply by being ordinary, and this was one of them.
After tea, we walked together along the river, down to the quay where the Danube Empress lay at her mooring. The wind was sharp off the water, and I wrapped my coat tighter around me, but Kieran seemed not to notice the cold at all. He stood on the quay and looked at the boats for a long time, the Danube Empress and the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star, side by side, their paint bright, their flags stirring in the wind. "You did it," he said at last, quietly. "You got them all back." I told him that I had not done it alone, and that he knew better than anyone how true that was, and he nodded, a little embarrassed, the way he always was when anyone thanked him.
We boarded the Danube Empress, and I showed him the wheelhouse, and the saloon, and the deck where I had stood on the night of the anniversary cruise. He listened without interrupting, and when I finished, he put his hand on the rail and looked out at the river. "I think about that night often," he said. "I think about the sound of the water, and the cold, and the weight of you in my arms. I think about how close it came to being different." I told him that I thought about it too, every day, and that the memory no longer frightened me the way it once had. It had become a part of my story, like the founding of the company and the loss of Nelson, and I had learned to carry it without letting it carry me.
Before lunch, I introduced Kieran to Wesley on the quay, and I watched the two of them shake hands, the young pilot and the old lock-keeper, two men who loved the same river from different ends of it. They talked about the water levels and the spring currents, and about the lock gates, and they understood each other at once, the way river people always do.
We had lunch in a small restaurant near the quay, the kind of place where the waiters know the regulars by name and the menu has not changed in twenty years. Kieran ate heartily, and he told me stories about the river that made me laugh, stories about stubborn captains and flooded locks and a swan that had once nested in the lock gates and refused to move for a week. I laughed until my sides hurt, and it felt wonderful to laugh like that, freely and without thinking about what came next.
In the afternoon, we walked through the old streets of the city, past the cathedral and the quiet squares, and Kieran stopped often to look at the buildings, marvelling at their height and their age. He was a man of the river, and the city was strange to him, but he took it all in with the same steady attention he gave to the water. When we reached my house again, the light was fading, and the lamps were coming on in the windows.
Before he left, Kieran stood in my doorway and looked at me for a long moment. "You are well," he said, and it was not a question. "You are well, and the company is well, and the boats are well. That is all I ever wanted to know." I took his hand in both of mine and held it. "You saved my life," I told him. "And then you gave me back my courage. I will never forget either gift." He shook his head, embarrassed again, and said that anyone would have done the same. I did not argue with him. Some men do brave things and then insist they were ordinary, and the only proper answer is to love them for it, and to keep them close for the rest of your days.
He left the next morning, on the early train, and I stood on the platform and waved until the train was out of sight. Then I walked home through the waking city, and I thought about friendship, and about how the river had given me, in the darkest hour of my life, a friend I would never have found any other way.
Chapter 44
— Independent Governance