Chapter 468: The Dawn of a New Year
The Zehntner estate rose with stoic grace from the snow-dusted fields outside Berlin—proud, not ancient, and built not on lineage, but on earned honor. It was the home of a family whose nobility had been won on the battlefield, not passed down from coronets and court favor.
In the great hall hung a portrait of Jakob von Zehntner, the founder—a broad-shouldered Prussian officer with iron-gray eyes and a saber at his side. Enobled for his actions at Waterloo, where his infantry regiment broke the Imperial Guard’s final charge, Jakob had never worn his title like jewelry. To him, duty was its own inheritance. His descendants had never forgotten that.
Bruno sipped his Eierpunsch, warm and spiced, eyes lingering on the photorealistic image of his grandfather, Jakob von Zehntner. There was pride in his posture—and something unspoken behind his silence.
Unseen, his second son Josef had come to find him. It was New Year’s Eve at the Zehntner estate... Josef was supposed to be mingling with his cousins, his aunts, his uncles, and even distant family members who shared the same surname.
Josef didn’t have the same difficulties with their family as his older siblings had. He was born in a time after Bruno had forgiven his brothers and earned their loyalty and respect. He and his younger siblings did not have to listen to the whispers spoken about the last son of the main line who had married a bastard girl and fathered "unclean" children.
Erwin, Elsa, and Eva may remember these things, but Josef was either not yet born, or was too young for them to have taken root in his mind. Because of this, Bruno was a bit perplexed that he was here, watching his father silently enjoy art, rather than out enjoying the festivities with the family like he should be.
"Josef, what are you doing here at this hour? Should you not be enjoying the sweets that mother has cooked for you?"
Bruno never called her ’your grandmother.’ She was his mother—dignified, nurturing, and the only warmth he’d ever known in a family that had once rejected him. She had given him a home, in an era known for aristocratic families being aloof to their offspring.
His father? While stern, was ultimately a soldier like his father before him, and raised sons with discipline, respect, but also love, not in the modern soft manner of a postmodern man, but in the rigid, protective way a man willing to die for the health, wellbeing, and future of his sons would in an era of reason, and strong family ties.
Josef, however, was quick to respond to his father, with a phrase he was not expecting at this time.