He examined him for the better part of two hours. Hannah was not in the room and did not ask to be, and she spent the whole of it in the small drawing room with the household books open in front of her, and did not write one line.
He came out at about four and asked for her by name. "His Grace has asked that you be present, and I want to say at the start that I have told him nothing yet, because I thought it better that you should both hear the same words at the same time."
Hannah Sedge sat down beside her husband.
"Now," said Ambrose Pell, "I am going to be exact, and it is going to take some minutes, and I am going to begin with the part that does me no credit. Eight years ago, I examined you three times in a spring, and I told you that your heart was failing, and that you would not see five-and-thirty. I remember saying it. I remember this room. And I was not lying to you, and I was not careless. I found a disorder of the heart, and I found it plainly, and it is there this afternoon, and I have found it again today, and any physician in England would find it in about four minutes. What I did—and I have thought about this every day for a fortnight—was put a number on it."
Nobody in that room said anything.
"There is no number," said Ambrose Pell. "That is the whole of what I have come here to tell you, Your Grace, and I could have told you in a letter, and I would not do it in a letter. I have seen perhaps forty cases of the thing you have got in one-and-forty years. I have watched four of them die inside two years. I have watched two of them go on twenty and die of something else entirely. And one of those was a woman at Bath who I told in about '98 would not see the following spring, and who buried her own son at seventy-one. And in the spring you were eight-and-twenty, I sat in this chair, and I gave a man of eight-and-twenty a date because he asked me for one, and because I was two-and-sixty and had been the first man in this county for thirty years, and I was not accustomed to saying, 'I do not know.'"
Nicholas Ware sat entirely still. "So what have I got?" he said.
"You have got a disorder of the heart which is real, which is not going to be cured by me or by anybody, and which will very likely shorten your life," said Ambrose Pell. "You will not climb stairs. You will be breathless in cold air for the rest of your days, and it will get slowly worse, and there is nothing to be done about that. And it has not killed you in eight-and-a-half years, and there is not one thing I found in this room this afternoon that tells me it will kill you in the next eight. And I would not put a number on that either. I do not know how long you have got. Nobody does. And I told you that I did, and you believed me, and you were entitled to believe me, because I was extremely certain and I was the first physician in the west of England, and you have arranged eight years around it."
Ambrose Pell put his hands on his knees.