"That is the whole of what I have got to say, and I am not going to soften it," he said. "I was wrong to give you a number. I was not wrong about the heart. And there is nobody living who can tell you the difference between a man who is dying slowly and a man who is simply unwell. And I have spent one-and-forty years pretending otherwise. And I am seventy, and I have stopped."
He went away at about six. At the door, he said one more thing, which Hannah wrote down that night and kept:
"Your Grace, the letter... I want to say that it was the right thing, and that it took some doing, and that in one-and-forty years I have had exactly one patient ask me to look again, and it was this month. And there are a great many men in this county who I gave opinions to when I was two-and-sixty and certain."
Nicholas Ware did not want a day alone. That was the part Hannah had not prepared for and could not have predicted, and it took him about four hours to be able to say anything at all. But what he wanted, when he could, was to go out into the lower orchard—which was February, and cold, and entirely the wrong place for a man who was breathless in cold air. And he went anyway, and she went with him.
There were nine young trees in it, planted in the autumn, and about four feet high.
"They will fruit in about five years," he said.
"About that."
"I signed that order in September, and I did it because you made me feel ashamed of myself, and I have looked out of the window at those sticks about four hundred times since, and I have not once thought about apples." He had his hands in his pockets. "I have thought: that is what somebody does who expects to be here. And it has been the most uncomfortable four months of my life."
Hannah Sedge stood beside him in the cold. "Say the rest of it," she said.