The Bolter Read Free

other, facing Marble Arch and Hyde Park. It was a cavernous space for such a young couple, even if a family was already on the way.

    Spy cartoon of Idina’s father, Earl De La Warr, the motoring enthusiast
    Compared with Idina and Euan’s other home, however, Connaught Place was a pied-à-terre. William Weir had left Euan three adjoining estates in Scotland: Kildonan, Arnsheen, and Glenduisk. Weir had made his home at Kildonan, which surrounded the south Ayrshire village of Barrhill.
    A couple of hours’ drive south of Glasgow, Barrhill was an old staging post, where travelers and coaches had changed horses, on the single road cutting through the center of the region from coast to coast. The village itself was a handful of houses astride the River Duisk, which ran along the bottom of the valley. Surrounded by purple-tinged moorland, it was a world away from London. And there, a few feet above the Duisk, amid a riot of elephantine rhododendron and manicured lawns, spread Kildonan House. The west-facing front consisted of a small two-story eighteenth-century manor house: just three windows across on the first floor and one on either side of a pillared and porticoed front door. To the rear of this neat, pretty house spread a monstrosity of an L-shaped Victorian extension, all Gothic stone and ivy on the outside, and on the inside a jigsaw of windows, brick, tile, and half-timber. A way in which to rid themselves of some of the weight of their fortune presented itself to Idina and Euan.
    Twenty miles away on the coast, a Glaswegian architect called James Miller had built a vast new golfing and seaside hotel in the village of Turnberry. The hotel had been commissioned by the Glasgow and South Western Railway, which had extended its line along the coast for the purpose. Miller specialized in designing large public buildings such as town halls, hospitals, and railway stations. Idina and Euan commissioned him to build them a new house at Kildonan.
    Old Kildonan was to be razed to the ground and the new house erected on the same site. As this was a leveled-off area on the hillside where the valley bottomed out, bounded by the river on one side and aferocious burn and a brook on the others, it did not allow Miller a great deal of room to maneuver—especially when it came to Idina and Euan’s plans for the house.
    Ayrshire was a long way for their friends from London to travel. It required an overnight sleeper to Glasgow and then a couple of hours’ drive into the wilderness. It was too far for a Saturday-to-Monday visit and possibly too far for any stay of less than a week—for the entirety of which they would need to keep their friends entertained. The estate burgeoned with sporting opportunities: pheasant and foxes in the winter, grouse on the moors, and salmon and trout in the Duisk in the summer. When these failed, there were also the beaches and golf course at Turnberry. The one element, however, to which Idina and Euan and their guests would be hostage was the weather.
    When the sun shone, there seemed no brighter place in the country. When it chose not to, the skies clouded and rain fell thick and vertical in prison bars, keeping them indoors. They would need space in which to spend days at a stretch, amusements to fill the hours, and dozens of bedrooms in which to house the crowds of friends whom they, aged twenty and twenty-one, clearly could not imagine spending any time without.
    By the time Miller had finished he had drawn up plans for a house with five wings and with sixty-five rooms on the ground and first floors alone. These included dozens of larders and kitchens, servants’ bedrooms and laundry rooms, butlers’ rooms, a plate room (a walk-in safe for silver), drying rooms, linen rooms, even a flower room—all required to keep the house and its sporting activities running. On the ground floor there was an oversized squash court, a dining room, a drawing room, a billiard room, a smoking room, and a