She Ran From Her Unfaithful Fiancé Into a Dark Room—Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Inside, Waiting in the Shadows.
Chapter 13
They had children in time, and it was in the raising of them that the Duke of Jarnis completed the thing Pride had begun.
For a man may thaw his house and thaw his own heart and still, in the deepest place, fear that the cold will reach the next generation through him — that he will pass on his father’s gate to his own children without meaning to, the way the coldest inheritances are always passed on.
He confessed this fear to Pride before their first was born, in the dark, the way he confessed all his deepest fears.
“I had a cold father,” he said, “and he had a cold father before him, and the coldness has come down the Jarnis line for generations, each cold duke freezing the next. And I am afraid, Pride. I am afraid it is in me, in the blood, deeper than I can reach, and that I will do to my own child, without meaning to, without even noticing, the thing my father did to me. That I will meet its first grief with a lesson, and freeze it, and pass on the gate.”
“I do not want to. God knows I do not want to. But my father did not think he was cruel. He thought he was wise. He thought he was giving me a gift — the gift of a closed gate no enemy could pass. What if I have the same blindness? What if I freeze my own child, and call it love, the way he did?”
“You will not,” Pride said. “And I will tell you exactly how I know, and then you will believe me, because you always believe me when I am plain with you.”
She took his hand in the dark.
“You will not freeze your child, Leo, because you are afraid of freezing your child. Do you understand? Your father was never once in his whole life afraid of being cold. He believed coldness was strength. He passed on the gate with a clear conscience, certain he was doing right. A man who is terrified of passing on the cold is, by that very terror, incapable of passing it on without noticing — because he will be watching for it every day, in himself, more closely than anyone. And the moment he sees the cold rise in him, the moment his child weeps and some old frozen voice says give it a lesson, he will recognize the voice as his father’s — and do the opposite.”
“Your fear is not the sign that you will fail, Leo. It is the exact thing that guarantees you will not. The cold dukes of Jarnis never feared the cold. You fear it with your whole soul. That is how I know the line ends with you. That our children will be the first Jarnis children in generations to be met, in their first grief, not with a lesson, but with an embrace.”
“You will give them the thing you never got, precisely because you know, in your own body, the size of the wound left by its absence. Your father’s cruelty, passed down to you, will end in you becoming the warmest father in England — because there is no one so tender to a child’s grief as a man who was frozen in his own.”
She pressed his hand.
“Trust me. I have watched you learn Foster’s name and ask the boot boy if he was hurt. I am not worried about our children for one single moment. Neither should you be.”
And she was right, as she was always right.
Their eldest was a boy. And when he was seven years old — the very age at which the Duke’s own dog had died, and his own grief had been met with a lesson — the boy’s dog died, and the child came to his father sobbing, inconsolable, his whole small world ended.
And the Duke of Jarnis, who had rehearsed this moment in dread for seven years, felt the old, cold voice rise in him exactly as he had feared it would. Give the boy a lesson. Teach him he erred in loving a thing that could be taken. Close his gate before the world does it for him.
And he recognized the voice at once — as Pride had promised he would — as his father’s voice, and not his own.
And he did the opposite of everything it told him.
He got down on the floor.
He gathered his sobbing son into his arms — this great Duke of Jarnis, on the nursery floor — and held him while he wept. And he did not tell him love was a mistake, or grief an error, or that a wise boy closes his gate. He told him the truth. The warm truth. The thing his own father should have told him forty years before.
“It hurts because you loved him,” the Duke said into his son’s hair. “That is what the hurt is. It is the love with nowhere left to go. And it is right that it hurts, and you must not be ashamed of it, and you must not let anyone tell you that you were foolish to love a thing that could die.”
“Because everything can die, my boy. Everything and everyone. And if we only loved the things that could not be taken from us, we should love nothing at all — and that would be a far colder grief than this one, and it would last your whole life instead of just a while. You loved him, and he loved you, and now he is gone, and it hurts, and I am here, and I am not going to tell you to stop.”
“I am going to sit here on this floor and hold you for as long as it takes, and we will cry about the dog together, because he was a good dog, and he deserves to be cried about, and there is no shame in it, and there never was, and anyone who ever told you otherwise was wrong, and frightened, and to be pitied.”
“Cry as long as you like,” said the Duke of Jarnis, on his knees on the nursery floor, holding his son. “I have got you. I am not going anywhere.”
And he sat there and held his weeping son for a long time, and wept with him — for the dog, and for the boy, and for another boy of seven, forty years before, who had wept alone and been given a lesson instead of an embrace. And he understood that Pride had been entirely right. That the line ended with him. That his own frozen grief had become, in the fullness of time, the exact thing that let him give his son the warmth he had never received.
And he looked up, over his son’s head, and saw Pride standing in the nursery doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth and tears running down her face — watching the gate that had come down the Jarnis line for generations end, forever, on a nursery floor.