‘I borrowed it from Uncle Dickie,’ Philip says cheerfully. He might as well be upfront about his lack of wardrobe. ‘He’s much broader than me, as you know, so it’s not a great fit.’ He plucks at the front of the jacket to demonstrate. ‘But it seemed a better option than my father’s old dinner jacket, which fits better but which is distinctly threadbare.’

The King snorts.

Elizabeth lays a hand on her father’s arm. ‘Papa, do you think we should tell Philip what the routine is at Balmoral?’

‘Haven’t you told him yet?’ The King is clearly still in a bad mood although Elizabeth’s touch seems to be calming.

‘I was afraid it might put him off.’ She sends Philip a glimmering smile. ‘There’s walking, fishing, shooting, stalking …’

‘A sportsman’s paradise,’ the King adds.

‘I’m afraid my sport is cricket,’ says Philip. ‘Although I’m not bad at darts either.’

The King is unamused. ‘You don’t shoot?’ he asks incredulously.

‘Sadly not, sir.’ He notices the temperature dropping and encounters a clear look from Elizabeth. ‘But I’m very willing to learn,’ he recovers himself and is rewarded by a lessening of the black look on the King’s face.

‘Good, good. We’ll send you out with a ghillie tomorrow. Get you a feel for stalking,’ the King says. ‘It’s a sport that demands fitness, cunning, and endurance, isn’t that so, Lilibet?’

‘It is.’ She exchanges a warm smile with her father but when she turns to Philip, her eyes hold more than a hint of mischief. ‘You’ll love it, Philip. Wait until you bag your first deer.’

Somehow Philip doubts that. There’s cricket, of course, but generally his tastes run to activities that will make his adrenalin surge: waterskiing or driving fast along a winding road or clinging to the mast, the salt spray stiff on his face, as a boat ploughs into a ten-foot wave.

The thought of spending a day trudging over a boggy hillside in the rain leaves him cold, but the message is clear.

He must learn to shoot to please Elizabeth and the King.

He forces a smile. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

When he is woken early the next morning to the sound of rain slashing against the window, Philip is strongly tempted to turn over and tell Ewan to bugger off and let him sleep. But the memory of that bad-tempered twitch under the King’s eye has him dragging himself out of bed. He will need to make up for the lack of proper wardrobe somehow.

Still yawning, he stumbles along to the breakfast room, only to be met by an appalled silence as the King and the other assembled men, all of them dressed in the regulation plus fours, regard his flannel trousers in horror.

‘For God’s sake, man!’ The King glares at him. ‘Didn’t they send you a clothing list? You’re not seriously proposing to go out on the hill in those trousers, are you?’

‘It’s these or nothing, I’m afraid, sir.’

Determined not to be cowed, Philip helps himself to bacon and eggs from the large chafing dishes set out on the sideboard. The faces around the breakfast table are mostly familiar from the evening before: a mixture of local landowners with beefy faces and the stalwarts of the moustachioed courtiers, all of whom seem to have perfected that long-faced, well-bred English look which enables them to convey contempt with the slight lift of an eyebrow.

Apart from Elizabeth, and Margaret who is as pert as ever, his welcome at Balmoral has been distinctly chilly. How quickly the war has been forgotten, Philip thinks to himself, remembering how much warmer the King and Queen had been when he had tales from the frontline to amuse them.

Or perhaps it had been when he was just a distant relative instead of a penniless and determined suitor to their daughter’s hand?

Chapter 26

Philip doesn’t care. He is here because Elizabeth wants him here, and if the rest of them don’t like it, they can go hang. Standing next to her last night, he had met the assembled disapproval with a challenging gaze.

‘I keep expecting you to nip Lilibet’s neck,’ Margaret said to him at one point when they found themselves alone. She was sitting on the arm of a sofa; he was watching Elizabeth who was talking to a stout young man who doubtless had acres of grouse moor to his name.

Philip stared down at Margaret, unsure if he had heard correctly. ‘To do what?’

‘Nip her neck. You know, like a stallion.’ Margaret sipped at her glass before registering his blank expression. ‘Oh, I keep forgetting you’re not a horsey type. A stallion nips at a mare’s neck to cut her out of the herd. That’s exactly what you look like when you’re standing next to Lilibet, like you’ve cut her out and staked your claim and are daring anyone else to have her. It’s quite … arousing.’

Philip was betrayed into a laugh. ‘How old are you now, Margaret?’

‘Sixteen. Almost,’ she added.

‘Pretty and precocious, that’s a dangerous mixture. You’re going to be a handful.’

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ she said. There’s nothing else for me to be, is there?’

After breakfast, Philip finds himself with others milling around outside the entrance in the rain with dogs and lugubrious-looking ghillies while the King barks orders about who is to go where and with whom. It is the only time Philip has ever seen him look truly confident. Here, on this isolated estate, Bertie can be king indeed.

There is a near disaster when the King discovers that not only does Philip not own plus fours, he hasn’t brought his own gun.

‘He can borrow mine, Papa,’ Elizabeth says quickly, spotting that the King is on the verge of one of his notorious ‘gnashes’. ‘I’m riding today anyway.’

‘Thank you,’ Philip says sincerely as Elizabeth hands him her gun, and her quick smile warms him. He lowers his voice. ‘The King isn’t really planning to go out in this, is he?’ he says, turning his collar up against the rain. ‘I thought he would have cancelled by now’

Elizabeth looks surprised. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘This isn’t rain.’ She pats his arm and he observes darkly that there is a glint of amusement in her eyes. ‘This is just a bit of drizzle. It’ll clear up, don’t worry.’

The King is in such a bad mood by the time everyone is sorted out that Philip is glad to be sent off on his own for the day, accompanied by a monosyllabic ghillie introduced as Murdoch. It is apparently Murdoch’s task to find him a deer and show him how to kill it.

For miles and miles, Philip trudges behind Murdoch into the hills. He has had to borrow some boots until his shoes come back from the cobblers and as most of the time they seem to be walking through a bog, his socks are quickly sodden and a mammoth blister is developing on his heel.

Elizabeth is right, it does clear up. Or at least the sullen clouds haul themselves sufficiently off the mountain tops to enable him to see the bleak hillsides stretching into the distance. At which point the misery of the rain seeping down his collar is replaced by the torment of midges swarming around his head.

You’ll love it. Wasn’t that what Elizabeth had said? She must have known what it would be like.