“I wonder if any of my lot are responsible for this one,” he’d say, touching a crumbling wall in a building that had, once upon a time, been sacked and burned. Another day, we’d taken a rowboat to Threave Castle, and he’d opined, “I suspect this moat was meant to keep my family out. If Archibald the Grim’s grave is here, he’s spinning in it.”

It seemed that, while our decision to run had been spontaneous, visiting the various trappings (or crime scenes) of the institution we’d left behind was reinforcing Nick’s desire to stay away. And how ironic that, in the end, I had run off in order to save myself. Just not with Freddie, the way he’d hoped. I wondered idly if he’d thought of that, too. Or what he was thinking at all. Over the last several weeks, I’d written a hundred texts to Freddie that I’d deleted instead of sending—partly because I’d waited too long to know what to say. Hey, we saw a sausage roll that looks exactly like Cousin Nigel didn’t seem to cut it after all this time.

A burst of raucous laughter carried across the lawn.

“You’re off your head,” a girl cackled from several yards behind us.

“I am not! Look at him in that uniform! And now he’s all heartbroken, and needy, which makes him even sexier,” her friend said.

“Give that here,” said the first girl, and I heard the flutter of what sounded like a magazine being tossed from one to the next. “No, sorry, you’re mad. His wife went off and shagged his brother! He can’t know what he’s doing in there.”

“It’s not his fault she’s rubbish,” her friend said. “Imagine getting to have it off with them both, though, eh? And she did pick Nick, so he must not be totally useless.”

“Nah, love. Nick will be king in the streets, but Freddie is king in the sheets,” the girl said. This sent them into gales of laughter.

“Please have not totally useless put on my headstone.”

My eyes clicked back into focus. Nick was peering over my shoulder at the source of the chatter.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. “I’m just reveling in how lucky we are to picnic in this perfect field and paint medieval ruins.”

Nick rolled onto his stomach, facing the castle. “I wish I knew how to explain the effect these places have on me without sounding like a total prat,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t have oodles of stupendous old things in England. In London alone.”

“Well, these stupendous old things are new to you,” I said. “Of course they feel different.”

“They make me feel small. In a good way.” He picked a blade of grass and stretched it between his fingers. “Standing on top of centuries of history reminds me that being the future king is a fragment of it. I am not a big deal. In the scheme of things, I’m a blip. And maybe so is…”