"And the second thing is what I want," said Hannah Sedge. "You have asked me, and I am going to answer it exactly: I want you to stop arranging your death. Not to expect to live—I am not asking you to be a fool, and neither of us knows anything—to stop. You have got a house, and four thousand acres, and forty people, and a wife, and every one of them has been organized for eight years around a thing that is going to happen at an unknown time to everybody in England. Put it down, and decide about the orchard the way Mrs. Trant decides about the linen: which is that she does not know either, and she orders it anyway."
They had a son in the November, and they called him Ambrose, which was Hannah's idea and which Nicholas thought about for four days before he agreed to it.
Dr. Pell came to the christening. He was one-and-seventy by then, and had given up his practice in the spring, and he stood at the back of that church and was extremely quiet.
And afterward, he took Hannah's hand at the door and said, "Your Grace, I have written nine letters since February."
"Nine, sir?"
"To nine men and women in this county to whom I gave a number when I was certain, and who are still living," said Ambrose Pell. "Four of them have answered. Two of them were extremely angry with me, and I am glad of it. And one of them was a woman at Devizes whom I told in about '26 that she had a twelve-month, and who has been sitting in her sister's house for six years waiting, and who has now got a young man from Bristol coming to look at her in the spring."
He never climbed a flight of stairs without stopping at the turn, and he was breathless in cold air until the day he died. And there were nights in that chair in the garden room for the whole of the rest of his life—perhaps four a month at the start, and more later—and Hannah sat on the floor beside it for every single one of them that she knew about.
He was never well. That was the truth of it, and neither of them ever pretended otherwise to their children or to anybody else. The thing Ambrose Pell found in a library when he was eight-and-twenty was real, and it was there when he was fifty, and it was what killed him in the end. It simply took nine-and-twenty years about it.
There were four children, and the eldest of them ate the first apples off the lower orchard when he was five. And Nicholas Ware sat on a bench at the end of that orchard and watched him do it, and did not say anything to anybody for about a quarter of an hour.