Elizabeth gives in and laughs. ‘A little bit, maybe. Usually I’m the one who feels out of place,’ she confesses. ‘Now you know how I feel at parties. Was it awful?’

‘What, you mean apart from the incessant rain and the midges and a blister the size of Paris on my heel?’

She grimaces with sympathy. ‘A blister? Ouch. Try padding it with some fleece, Philip. You’ll find bits on the hillside wherever the sheep have been. But you don’t have to go again. Stalking isn’t for everyone.’

‘Oh yes I do,’ Philip says grimly. ‘There is no way I’m going to tell your father I gave up after one day. I’m going to bag a deer if it kills me. I’m thinking of it as my quest,’ he adds, only half joking. ‘I need to slay a deer to win my princess.’

***

So day after day he slogs up the hillsides with Murdoch. The ghillie teaches him how to scan the landscape for the deer that are so perfectly camouflaged against the moorland. He shows Philip how to drop onto his stomach and wriggle through the heather inch by inch, ignoring the black boggy water and the flies and the sheep droppings. For most of the time Philip is wet and cold and uncomfortable but the challenge of stalking a wild beast across the hillside has captured his imagination. There is something primordial about what he is doing. It reminds Philip of sailing at Gordonstoun, struggling to keep control of the cutter as it bucked over the waves and the wind screamed and threw spray viciously at his face. Stalking may not feel as dangerous, but it is man against nature again, and nature definitely has the upper hand.

Sometimes Murdoch gestures to Philip to freeze and drop to the ground. He passes him the binoculars and points, and when Philip brings them into focus, he sees a herd in the distance. But they always scatter before they are close enough to take aim.

‘I had a stag in my sights today,’ he tells Elizabeth at tea one day. ‘He must have got a whiff of us or something because he took off before I could pull the trigger.’

‘Oh, what a shame!’

‘Ye-es.’ Philip chews a fish-paste sandwich thoughtfully. He is oddly torn. ‘Part of me wanted to take the shot and prove I could do it. But another part of me was glad he got away. He was such a magnificent beast. I didn’t want to kill him. It’s a pity we can’t have the challenge of stalking and the reward of taking a photograph at the end.’

‘We need to shoot them to manage numbers,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I understand what you mean: to see an animal like that in the wild is a thrill, but if we let them breed unchecked, half of the herd will starve or succumb to diseases and that is a much grimmer death than a clean shot. It’s not just shooting for the sake of it: we manage the deer and the habitat, we eat the venison … it’s part of the natural order of things.’