Chapter 45
— The River Keeps Its Own
In the spring, when the first warm days came to Vienna and the trees along the river burst into leaf, I stood on the deck of the Danube Empress as she slipped away from the quay, and I thought about everything the river had taken from me, and everything it had given back. The water was green and bright in the morning sun, and the Wachau Valley lay ahead of us, its vineyards climbing the hillsides, its old villages tucked into the bends of the river. Passengers crowded the rails, pointing and laughing, and children pressed their faces to the windows of the saloon, and I felt a peace settle over me that I had not felt in a very long time.
The river keeps its own, my mother used to say, and I had never understood what she meant until now. The Danube does not hurry, and it does not forget. It carries the boats that belong to it, and it returns what is taken from it, in its own time and in its own way. It took me in on the night of the anniversary cruise, cold and dark and frightening, and it gave me back to the world through the hands of a lock-keeper who happened to be watching the water at the right moment. It carried my husband's memory in its current, and it carried my company's boats home, one by one, until the fleet was whole again.
I thought about Nelson, standing beside me on this deck forty years ago, young and full of plans, telling me that we would build a company the river could be proud of. I thought about the years that followed, the good years and the hard ones, the storms we weathered and the passengers we carried, the children who grew up on these boats and came back as adults with children of their own. I thought about Landon, and the grief that still sat in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold. He was my son, and he had tried to kill me, and no victory in a hearing room would ever make those two facts sit comfortably together. I had stopped trying to make them sit comfortably. Some truths are simply carried, the way the river carries stones, smoothing them slowly, year after year.
I thought about Wesley, standing in the wheelhouse now, his hands on the wheel, guiding the Danube Empress through the valley he knew the way other men know their own gardens. I thought about Yvonne, and her courage, and about Kieran, and his kindness, and about Renata and Gwendolen and Zane and Fenella, all the people who had stood beside me when standing beside me was dangerous. A company is not a fleet of boats. It is the people who love the boats, and the river, and one another, and who refuse to let any of it be sold or stolen or lost.
The foundation had already begun its work. Only the week before, a class of schoolchildren had come aboard the Vienna Star, thirty of them, bright-eyed and full of questions, and the crew had shown them the engine room and the wheelhouse and the old logbooks, and told them how the river had carried traders and travellers for a thousand years. I had stood on the quay and watched them file aboard, and I had thought of the apprentices learning their craft, and of the archive we were building, and of all the small, patient work that keeps a river's history alive. None of it would make headlines. All of it mattered.
My own days had found a rhythm again. I rose early, and I walked along the river before breakfast, and I read the papers in my office with the window open to the water. I chaired the board, and I visited the boats, and I wrote in my logbook, in ink, by hand, the way I always had. The work was not glamorous, but it was mine, and it was honest, and it was enough. In the evenings, I sometimes sat by the window and watched the lights come on along the quay, and I thought about how close we had come to losing all of it, and how grateful I was for the second chance the river had given me.
The Danube Empress moved steadily through the Wachau Valley, and the hills slid past on either side, green and gold in the spring light. I stood at the rail and watched the water, and I thought about the future, which was no longer something I feared. The foundation would keep the old boats safe. The new charter would keep the company honest. Wesley would keep the river. And I would keep the chair, for as long as I was able, and then I would hand it on, knowing that it was held by something stronger than any one person.
The river keeps its own, and it had kept me. It had kept the boats, and the company, and the promise Nelson and I made to each other on the day we founded it. As the Danube Empress sailed on toward Passau, her flags flying and her passengers laughing, I lifted my face to the sun and I smiled. The river flowed on beneath us, wide and patient and enduring, and I knew, with a certainty I had not felt in years, that it would flow on long after I was gone, carrying the boats and the stories and the people who loved them, all the way to the sea.