Elizabeth doesn’t look at him. She looks at the shining surface of the loch, feels the breeze caress her cheek and lift her hair. ‘Sometimes I think what life would have been like if Uncle David hadn’t abdicated,’ she admits at last. ‘But there’s not much point in wishing that things were different. I don’t want to waste my life feeling resentful. I can’t change things and … and it seems cowardly to want to avoid responsibility and duty,’ she goes on, struggling to put her thoughts into words. ‘I think of it as God’s will. It’s my destiny to be Queen one day and I will always, always have to do the right thing because that is what I am now and I can’t change it. It just is.’

‘I understand that,’ Philip says. ‘We have to accept the way things are. That’s what I felt when my family broke up and I was sent to school. I could have wept and wailed but it was clear to me even at nine that nothing I did was going to change the situation, so I just had to accept it.’

She turns to look at him then. He does understand. ‘I wasn’t right about what I said earlier.’

‘What was that?’

‘About no one seeing me for myself. There is someone,’ she says. ‘There’s you.’

There’s you. Her words seem to echo in the quiet air: you … you … you.

Elizabeth’s gaze is tangled up in Philip’s blue eyes and she can’t seem to look away. His body is long and astonishingly solid beside her. Close enough to touch if she chooses to. If she dares. But she can’t move. She is held in place as surely as if the boulder has slid invisible bonds around her wrists and ankles. All she can do is breathe while the silence stretches until the sound of Susan lapping noisily at the edge of the loch breaks the tension at last and they both laugh.

‘That’s why I wanted you to come here,’ she says easily enough after all.

Strange how sharp and clear everything suddenly seems, Elizabeth thinks as she lies right back and looks up at the sky. The intense blue is broken by the occasional puff of cloud drifting on the breeze that carries with it the smell of heather and peat and bracken. Somewhere a curlew is calling. The space and the stillness of the mountains seem to pulse, as if the earth’s heart is beating and as she stares into the blue she can almost swear she can feel the world turning. Instinctively, she spreads her hands out on the rock beside her to anchor herself.

Now is the time to say it. Will you marry me? It will sound too bald just on its own, Elizabeth realises. She should lead up to it but the carefully prepared speech that she rehearsed to herself over and over again has gone out of her head.

Perhaps she doesn’t need a lead up? It’s not as if her proposal will come out of the blue. Surely, if Philip has spoken to her father about it, he must want to marry her? She should just come out and say it.