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    â€˜What do you want?’ stammered the boy.
    â€˜To talk about Turner,’ I said.
    The boy relayed this to the man upstairs, who promptly roared:
    â€˜What the devil does that mean?’
    â€˜What the -?’ began the boy, so thoroughly embarrassed now that you could have lit a cigar from his face. I stepped past him into the hall, to be met by a line of unsmiling family portraits and, at the foot of the stairs, a large oil-painting of what appeared to be the Battle of Waterloo. Staring down at me from the first-floor landing was a fine-looking man of seventy or so, with white whiskers, a noble nose and a heroic brow. He wore a paint-stained smock tied loosely at the neck, and was tapping the handle of a brush impatiently against the banister.
    â€˜I was told you knew Turner well,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘and what of it?’
    â€˜I am hoping to write his biography.’
    â€˜Are you, by God?’ He leant forward, peering closely at me. ‘You’re not that what-ye-call-him, been making such a damned nuisance of himself?’
    â€˜Do you mean Mr. Thornbury?’ I said.
    He grunted.
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    He pondered a moment, then said: ‘Come up. Fifteen minutes.’
    A moonlit seascape hung above the stairs, and another battle scene – showing a knot of red-coated soldiers clustered round a tattered union flag, while the shadowy enemy crept towardsthem through a fog of gunsmoke – dominated the landing. I stopped before it, and asked:
    â€˜Is that one of yours?’
    He nodded abruptly. ‘Can’t get rid of ‘em. No-one wants anything now except pretty little pictures of their families, all scrubbed clean and dressed up like tailors’ dummies. And those damned fainting women.’ He shook his head. ‘Madness.’
    I could not help smiling – he had skewered both Travis and me with a single stroke – but fortunately he was too busy wiping his fingers on his smock to notice.
    â€˜It’s very impressive,’ I said.
    He nodded again. ‘There, I shan’t smear you now,’ he said, and grasped my hand. ‘How d’ye do?’
    As if that simple formality had qualified me to be admitted to his confidence, he turned and led me into a double room – divided in the middle by folding doors – which ran the entire depth of the house. At one end was the large bay, giving a distant view of the heath and washing the walls and floor with silvery light; at the other, a south-facing rear window, unshuttered, but screened with a sheet, presumably to mute the effect of the sun.
    A huge unfinished canvas, held upright on a crude frame, stood in the bay, next to a table spread with brushes and an open paintbox. It was turned to catch the north light, and I could consequently only half-see the subject; but I made out enough – a woman on a horse, surrounded by armed men, and a line of sails on the horizon – to guess that the subject was Queen Elizabeth before the Spanish Armada. On a dais in the centre of the room, a woman in a blue velvet cloak and a tall hat sat for the central figure. Her ‘horse’ had been ingeniously constructed of three bolsters lashed together and laid between a pair of trestles; and she held before her a wooden sword, which – doubtless because she had been at it some time, and her arm was tired – wavered perilously.
    â€˜Very well,’ said Davenant. ‘You can have a break, Mrs. Holt.’
    â€˜It would be as well, sir,’ she said, taking off her hat, ‘if you’re to get your dinner.’
    â€˜Never mind about my dinner,’ he said. ‘If I keep you here all afternoon, it’s no matter: you can send out for a pie. A cup of teain the kitchen, to restore you; and then back to singeing King Philip’s beard.’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ she said, compliantly enough – but her eyes rolled with a comic