The Bolter Read Free Page A

sixty-foot-long, double-height baronial hall with a minstrel’s gallery peeping over from the top of the main staircase next door.
    On the first floor, in an L along the two principal wings, and linked by no fewer than five staircases to the ground, ran two 120-foot-long passageways. Off these were eight main guest bedrooms on the outward-looking, lawn side of the house, half with dressing rooms attached in which a husband could sleep, allowing couples used to different partners to separate for the night, and serviced by a row of bathrooms on the courtyard side of the house—which in themselves provided a reason for guests to be wandering the passageways after lights-out. At the far end, separated from the rest of the house by the upper half of the great hall, were Euan and Idina’s rooms.
    Ignoring the custom for separate rooms in one’s own house, they had just one bedroom leading to a large bathroom. On the far side of this, with an entrance between three vast walk-in cupboards in the passageway, was a large dressing room for Euan. Next door to this, just outside the entrance to the apartment from the first floor, was Idina’s maid’s bedroom, within, as was customary, calling distance during the night.
    There was one more floor above this. Here another pair of 120-foot passageways linked a long Elizabethan gallery and a rabbit warren of dozens of nursery bedrooms and servants’ rooms to house not just Idina and Euan’s own staff but the ladies’ maids, gentlemen’s valets, drivers, and loaders for the pairs of Purdey shotguns that their guests would bring with them. In all, Idina and Euan’s plans for their new house contained over a hundred rooms. In the age of the great Edwardian house party, it was designed to cater to every creature comfort their guests might require—in an understated way. The exterior, instead of displaying the vastness of the house inside, did everything it could to conceal it.
    For a start, each floor was markedly, almost overly, low-ceilinged, keeping down the overall height of the building. In addition to this feature of the design, most of the second floor of the house and some of the first were to be hidden within sloping roofs dotted with dormer windows. These roofs were to be covered with soft brown slates from Caithness in the north of Scotland. The walls themselves were to be constructed from creamy yellow Northumbrian stone, each irregularly sized brick carefully chosen. Each façade was to be broken up by an equally carefully planned irregularity of porches, loggias, gables, protruding extensions, bay windows, and the vast double-height window of the great hall. It would look not unlike a larger, newer version of Idina’s childhood home, Old Lodge. The overall effect from the rolling lawns outside was one of a romantic, rambling late-medieval manor house. Yet it was totally modern. Each stone brick was hammered flat, its edges polished. The stone-mullioned windows contained steel casements. Inside, the numerous bathrooms were equipped with the latest plumbing. And the decoration was near-monastic—white plasterwork and exposed brick surrounded pale, unpolished, gray oak paneling. It would cost more than seventy thousand pounds, an astounding expenditure at that time.
    The first task in this great project was, as these plans were being drawn up, discussed, and redrawn, to take down the old house. In thespring of 1914, as the thick layer of winter snow cleared, the tiles were pulled off the roof of Old Kildonan.

    Kildonan House, Ayrshire: the home that Idina designed for her life with Euan and their children. She worked on the plans but never saw the house completed .
    IDINA NOW HAD EVERYTHING in place for a magnificent life. She, Little One, had the Brownie she loved, and soon they would have a child. Euan had embedded himself at the heart of Idina’s family. He popped in and out of their houses alone, and had become an elder brother to the fatherless Avie 12 and Buck. The