‘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.