Philip thinks about the fur slipping down her arm, the blood running warm beneath her skin. How tempting it had been to reach out and adjust the stole for her, to take the opportunity to trail his fingers over her shoulder.

Just as well he hadn’t tried it, he reflects wryly. She might be disposed to admire him, but she would need to feel a lot more than that before he would be allowed any closer.

Courting Elizabeth may turn out to be harder task than Philip thought, but then, he has always liked a challenge.

***

‘It’s bloody freezing,’ Philip tells David, raising his voice above the sound of the engine. They’re in his beloved MG, heading back to Windsor Castle. It’s Christmas Eve and a hard frost has left the countryside edged in glittering white. Philip settles his sunglasses one-handed on his nose. The sky is a thin, washed blue, the light low and glaring.

‘Everywhere’s bloody freezing at the moment,’ David grumbles. His cousin likes his comforts.

‘But Windsor Castle takes cold to a whole new level. It’s probably freezing in a heatwave. Something to do with all that stone.’

In spite of his complaints about the cold, Philip is in a cheerful mood. The last few days have been fun: plenty of socialising, plenty of drinking and solitude when he needs it at Chester Street, where he sleeps happily on a camp bed in the dining room and Mrs Cable, the rough-tongued cook, spoils him.

The Mountbattens’ home is a haven, and so much more comfortable than staying in Kensington Palace with his cousin and their grandmother, the formidable Dowager Duchess of Milford Haven, who is grand enough not to care what anyone else thinks but has plenty to say about what she thinks of her grandsons. She has ears like a bat, David claims, and no matter how quietly they try to tiptoe past her apartment, she always calls them in with her harsh smoker’s voice to berate them for their lateness or lack of consideration while the ash trembles on the end of her inevitable cigarette only to fall onto her skirts and be brushed impatiently away.

‘I don’t care how cold it is, anywhere would be better than staying with Grandmama,’ says David, following his own train of thought. ‘I tried to sneak Robyn in the other night. I thought there was no way Grandmama would be awake, but I swear she took up the carpets deliberately to listen out for that creaking floorboard.’

‘You should know where it is by now.’

‘I ended up shoving poor old Robyn into the broom cupboard.’ David sighs. ‘I wish we could get Lynden Manor back. You wouldn’t catch Mama making a fuss about bringing a girl home.’

Philip gives a crack of laughter. David’s mother, Nada Milford Haven, is notorious for her affairs with men and women. She is exotically beautiful and glamorous and generous, one of the most interesting and intriguing people Philip knows. It was Nada and her husband, his uncle George, who first gave him a home when he was a small boy in need of one and Philip adores her.