“Good morning,” Henry Winter said in his cold voice, sitting at the end of the porch. It's early morning and no one else is awake but the two of them. Henry was always an early riser. The morning was the best time for him to work.

He was without a jacket but otherwise immaculate for such an ungodly hour: trousers knife-pressed, his white shirt crisp with starch. On the table in front of him were books and papers, a steaming espresso pot and a tiny cup, and an unfiltered cigarette burning in an ashtray.

Currently, he seemed to be working on translating Paradise Lost into Latin. He decided to explain, "I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English – of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I’m referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose." He laid his cigarette back in the ashtray.

‘Will you have some coffee?’ He asked, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulders.