'Suvinder?'

'Yes?' he said, still not turning to look at me.  He blew his nose.

'I am so sorry.

He waved one hand and shrugged.  He carefully folded the handkerchief again.

'Look,' I said, 'why not tell people that I'm thinking about it?'

He looked back with a smile. 'What would be the point of that?'

'It might…No, you're right, it's a stupid idea.'

He returned to the table, pocketing the hanky and taking a deep breath, his head high. 'Oh, look at us, eh?  I am ashamed at myself for spoiling a perfectly good picnic, ruining a most pleasant holiday.'

'You haven't ruined anything, Suvinder,' I said, as he held my seat for me.

'Good.  I must say, I'm still hungry.  Let us eat, shall we?'

'Let's.'

He hesitated as he was about to take his seat. 'May I say one more thing?  Then I promise never to raise the subject again.'

'All right.'

'I think I love you, Kathryn.' He paused. 'But that is not why I asked you to marry me.'

'Oh,' I said.

'I asked you to marry me because I think you will make a wonderful wife and because you are somebody I can imagine being with for the rest of my life, when perhaps love, of a sort, of a very important and special sort, might grow between us.  I think it is wonderfully romantic to marry for love alone, but I have seen so many people do so and live to regret it.  There are some lucky people, no doubt, for whom everything works out just perfectly, but I have never met any.  For most people, I think, to marry for love is to marry…at the summit, as it were.  It must be downhill from there on.  To marry for other reasons, with one's head and not just one's heart, is to embark on a different sort of journey, uphill, I suppose,' he said, looking embarrassed. 'My goodness, I do not choose my metaphors so well, do I?  But it is a journey which offers the hope that things will become gradually better and better between the people concerned.' He spread his hands and gave a sharp sort of laugh. 'There.  My thoughts on the Western romantic marriage ideal.  I did not put it, or rather them, very well, but there you are.  No more.'

'You put it just fine, Suvinder,' I told him.

'I did?' he said, pouring some more tea from the padded pot. 'Oh, good.  Please, another sandwich?  We cannot feed them all to the birds.'

Even moving higher than Thuhn, scaling tracks that seemed to zigzag up for ever to still higher valleys, you could find yourself beneath the lowest limit of an animal's domain; snow leopards that lived perpetually above the tree line and bharals that even in winter never descended below four thousand metres.

'You what?  You go to this remote Himalayan kingdom, the Prince proposes to you and you turn him down?  Are you fucking insane?'

'Of course I turned him down.  I don't love him.'

'Ah, so what?  Say yes anyway.  What girl gets a chance to marry a prince these days?  Think of your grandchildren!'

'I don't want grandchildren.  I don't want children!'

'Yes, you do.'

'No, I don't.'

'You do too.  No one's mileage varies that much.'

'I'm telling you I don't, dammit!'

'Yeah, right.'

'Luce, I wouldn't lie to you.  I've never lied to you.'

'Oh, come on, you must have.  I'm your girlfriend, not your analyst.'

'What a terrible attitude!  And I don't even have an analyst.'

'Exactly.'

'What do you mean "exactly"?'

'That just shows how much you need one.'

'What?  Not having an analyst shows how much I need an analyst?'

'Yes.'

'You're mad.'

'Yeah, but at least I've got an analyst.'

Slow-gliding in the air above them all slid the wing-spread shapes of the bone-eating lammergeiers, forever cruising the blade-thin winds that sliced across the frozen peaks.

'Mr Hazleton?'

'Kathryn?'

'I just had a funny thought.'

'Funny?  How do you mean? I thought you'd be ringing about Freddy —'

'Mr Hazleton, I've just received a proposal of marriage from the Prince.  Am I supposed to…What about Freddy?'

'You haven't heard?  Oh dear.  He was in a car crash. He's in — what do they call it nowadays? — Intensive Care. Kathryn, I'm very sorry to be the one to tell you, but they don't seem to think he's going to make it. He was asking to see you.  Though, I don't know, by the time you'd be able to get there…'

Suddenly I remembered — or half-remembered — a joke Uncle Freddy had told me once, something about a man, a fanatical hunter who was a great marksman with a double-barrel shotgun and was forever bagging vast quantities of grouse and pheasant but who in the end went mad and sincerely thought he was the piece of cotton on the end of a length of string that shotgun owners use to clean out the barrels of their guns.  The punchline was his wife saying, 'But, Doctor, do you think he'll pull through?'  This had sent Uncle Freddy into a tearful, knee-slapping frenzy; I could still see him hooting and guffawing and bending and struggling to catch his breath through his laughter.

I said, 'Tell them I'm on my way.'

CHAPTER TEN

I fussed and fretted throughout the rest of that evening and into the night, making calls, sending e-mails, trying to sleep, not sleeping.  Suvinder looked shaken when he heard about Uncle Freddy.  He arranged for the Twin Otter to bring forward its flight the next day: it would leave at dawn from Dacca and turn around as quickly as possible.  Luckily the weather forecast was fairly benign.  Tommy Cholongai's Lear wasn't available but there would be a company Gulfstream waiting for me at Siliguri by noon.

The Prince had to pay a belated visit to his mother that evening.  I spent most of the time in my room on the phone; my little quilted chattering lady, who was called Mrs Pelumbu, brought me a meal, though I didn't eat much.

I called Leeds General, the hospital in the UK where Uncle Freddy had been taken, and eventually persuaded them that I was both a relation and that I was the 'Kate' that Freddy kept asking to see.  He was in Intensive Therapy, as Hazleton had said.

A road traffic accident on the A64, two days earlier, during heavy rain.  Four other casualties, two discharged, others not in danger.  They wouldn't actually tell me how bad he was straight out, but they did say if I wanted to see him I should get there as soon as I could.

I tried Blysecrag.  Miss Heggies answered.

'How bad is he, Miss H?'

'I…They…He…You…'

Miss H was reduced to little more than personal pronouns.  The small amount of sense I did manage to get out of her only confirmed that Uncle Freddy was very poorly indeed, and in a sense I didn't even need that; just hearing how emotional and distraught this former paragon of stainless rectitude had become was enough to tell me things must be fairly desperate (it also made me wonder if she and Uncle Freddy…well, never mind).

Hi, Stephen. Lost Event Horizon here.

Kathryn, I heard about Freddy Ferrindonald. Can you get back there to see him? Is there anything I can do?

I'm starting back tomorrow, weather permitting. You can tell me what the word is in-company. Any details?

Yep, thought you might ask, so I found all this out. He was driving to some place on the coast nearby- Scarboro? - during the evening; it was raining, he skidded on a corner and hit a car coming in the opposite direction. Wouldn't have been too bad but the whatever he was driving was so old it didn't have a seat-belt; apparently he went through the windscreen and ended up wrapped round a tree or a bush or something. Lot of head and internal injuries. We'd have got him to one of our hospitals - we had a Swiss air ambulance waiting at the local airport for him the next morning - but he's in too bad a way to move. Kathryn, I'm sorry, but from what I hear he isn't even fifty-fifty. He keeps asking for you. I think Miss H's nose is out of joint, and not just because he's not asking for her.  Apparently there's another woman there keeping vigil; this is the party he was on his way to visit in Scarboro.