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Then he examines me.
He does it in Bingley's library, very thoroughly, for most of an hour. He looks into my eyes with a candle. He feels the bone at my temple with his dry, careful fingers. He makes me walk across the room and back, and stand on one foot, and recite the kings of England, and tell him what I had for breakfast on Saturday and what I had for dinner on Wednesday last.
"Ducklings," I say. "With a white soup."
"Excellent, sir. Excellent." He makes a note. "And the headaches?"
I hesitate.
"Fewer," I say. "Much fewer. Once or twice this week. When I tried to remember."
He looks up sharply. "Remember?"
"The parsonage. Thursday evening. Things come, sometimes. A clock ticking. A voice. They are gone before I can catch them." I shrug. "I suppose that is a good sign."
Mr. Pettigrew says nothing for a long moment. He takes off his spectacles and polishes them, and puts them back on, and looks at me through them, very hard.
"It is a very good sign, sir," he says at last. "It means the mind is healing. The memory may come back entire, any day. Or it may come in pieces. Or not at all." He closes his notebook. "But the head is sound. The swelling is gone. The bone is knit. There is no fever and no confusion."
He stands up. He looks, I think, almost sorrowful, which is a strange way for a doctor to look when he is giving good news.
"You are quite recovered, sir," says Mr. Pettigrew. "I should say you may bear anything now."
Chapter Nineteen — Elizabeth
"You may tell him now, Miss Bennet," says Mr. Pettigrew.
He says it very quietly, in the shrubbery at Longbourn, where he has asked me to walk with him on the pretext of seeing the roses. We have not looked at a single rose. We have walked round the same path three times while he polished his spectacles and cleared his throat and did not say anything, and I have known for all three circuits what he was going to say, and now he has said it, and I find I cannot breathe.
"Now," I repeat.
"He is quite recovered." He puts the spectacles back on. Behind them his eyes are kind, and anxious, and very sorry. "I examined him at Netherfield this morning. The bone is knit. There is no fever. His mind is perfectly clear. He told me what he had for dinner on Wednesday last, and the order of the Plantagenet kings, and that he thought my neckcloth badly tied." A faint, rueful smile. "Which it was."
"And the shock? You said a shock might—"
"I said it might, miss, a month ago, when his head was still swelling. It will not now. Not in the way I feared." He hesitates. "It will be a shock. I will not pretend otherwise. It will hurt him. But it will not harm him. Not his body. He is strong. He will bear it."
I look down at the gravel.
"There is something else," says Mr. Pettigrew, more gently still. "He told me he has been remembering things. Pieces. A parlor. A clock. A voice. Did you know?"
"I guessed," I whisper. "I saw his face."
"Then you see why I say now." He looks at me steadily. "It is coming back, miss. It may come back tomorrow, or next month, or not for a year. But it is coming. And it would be far better, for both of you, if he heard it from you, gently, than if it came crashing in on him all at once, of its own accord." He pauses. "I have seen that too. It is not a kind thing."
The roses are very red against the wall. The bees are working in them. I can hear Kitty and Anne laughing somewhere on the other side of the house.
"Thank you, Mr. Pettigrew," I say.
He looks at me a moment longer. Then he takes my hand, awkwardly, and pats it, as though I were a patient of his and he had just told me something very unwelcome about my lungs.
"He is a good man, miss," he says. "I have attended a great many gentlemen. Very few of them would have paid my account three times over and told me to give the rest to the poor." He lets go of my hand. "I think he will forgive you. I think he will be very angry first. But I think, in the end, he will forgive you."
I cannot answer. I only nod.
He bows, and goes back toward the house, and leaves me alone with the roses.
***
