The Bolter Read Free Page B

Sackvilles and Brasseys in turn spun in and out of Connaught Place.
    Meanwhile, together, Euan and Idina were one of the most sought-after couples in town. He was rich and handsome, she was glamorous and daring. They were invited out in several directions each night. They were building a vast home that epitomized the Edwardian country-house dream. The only financial worry they might ever have would be that they had too much money rather than too little. And once they hadhad a couple of children they would be able to spend that money traveling the world in limitless adventures. For a girl who had been shunned by society as a child, it was almost too good to be true.
    Until the new house was built, Idina and Euan entertained their friends in London. When Euan returned from watching saddles being soaped, stirrups polished, and swords sharpened at Windsor, Idina welcomed him to a drawing room overflowing with young people. Their unmarried friends still lived with their parents. Idina and Euan’s house, however, was gloriously free of any parents at all. It was spacious, rule-free, and had endless supplies of food and drink being produced by innumerable staff, together with the very latest gramophone records. Night after night Idina and Euan dined in a great gang at the Ritz, the Carlton, or Claridge’s, went to the latest show, and then returned to Connaught Place. There their friends and Idina’s younger sister, Avie—just seventeen and so almost “out” in society—sang and listened to ragtime and blues until the early hours, perfecting their steps in the shockingly intimate tango or the latest “animal” dance from the United States, inevitably popularized by being denounced by the Vatican. They ground their bodies against one another in the Bunny Hug; hopped and scissor-stepped in the Turkey Trot; yelled, “It’s a bear!” as they swayed to the Grizzly. And, as spring turned into summer, the new Fox-trot arrived from across the Atlantic.
    But, on 28 June, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in the Serbian city of Sarajevo. Within a few weeks the world was at war.
    For a young Cavalry officer, it promised to be a glorious chance of an adrenaline-fueled charge for King and Country, followed by a glorious return to the stately life Euan and Idina were constructing. As war was declared, a line of twenty horse-drawn carts laden with stone were on their way from the station at Barrhill to the Kildonan building site. 13 But, by the time the war had ended, and the house had been built, both the world they were building it for—and Idina and Euan themselves—would have changed irrevocably.

Chapter 4
    O n 14 August 1914 Idina watched a single squadron of the 2nd Life Guards line up two abreast along an avenue running north-south just inside the eastern edge of Hyde Park. They wore their modern Cavalry uniform of khaki, only distinguished from foot soldiers by the leather of the cross belts that lay diagonally over their chests, broadening their shoulders.
    As the band struck up and Euan and his fellow officers moved off, rows of women lining the route in white dresses raised their arms and voices in euphoric excitement. Those chaps on horses, it was being whispered, were the lucky ones, the ones chosen to go to France. They had a chance of seeing the first action since the Boer War, which they had followed as short-trousered schoolboys. This was a token land force going over. Britain’s great strength, where surely it would flex its muscles in the fight to come, was at sea. In any case, it wouldn’t go on for long. The last war on the European mainland had been between France and Prussia more than four decades ago. It had lasted a year. The word on the street was that this one would be “over by Christmas.”
    The word being muttered along the corridors of power, however, was a little different. There the extravagantly moustached Lord Kitchener, victorious veteran of the fight against the Boers and