Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne Read Free Book Online Page A

were bursting at the seams with invitations.
    It was a high time for the twins. They were nineteen years old and just back from finishing school in Europe. Those impish grins had blossomed into flirtatious flickers. The heart-shaped faces had softened. Their thick, dark hair was piled up on their heads, as the fashion dictated. But those two pairs of blue eyes still sparkled as if their owners were just twelve years old.
    Lilla and Ada were pretty and knew it. They knew how to hold themselves in a corset; move their arms gracefully in the lightly frilled, high-collared shirts of the moment; step, not stride, in slimmed-down skirts; and perch their boaters at just the right angle. And they knew how to flirt. “They were extraordinarily interested in pleasing men,” I’m told.
    Their mother, Alice, showed them her other ways of making a man happy, too. How to make a room look inviting, pulling back the furniture to open it up yet not placing the chairs so far apart that a secretive whisper couldn’t travel from one to another. How to bring a garden indoors without creating a greenhouse. How to display the latest tastes in fashion, art, and music so that your husband feels he is ahead of his peers. How to keep a house fresh, the air so gently scented that you long to breathe in yet more of it, without it growing too hot or too cold inside. How to turn your kitchen into an ever-simmering workshop of succulent roasts and irresistible sweet bakes and soft spices to tease the tongue—because, however many servants you might have cooking for you, they would only be as good as you yourself could teach them to be. These talents, Alice taught her daughters, were the tools for marriage, the tools for the only life that lay ahead of them. These were the unseen keys, I can almost hear her murmuring, to unlocking a husband’s heart. Spoil him rotten, she would have whispered, cater to his every need, and he will not be able to help himself but show you love in return. And as Lilla and Ada watched Andrew dote on their mother, his eyes following her every time she swept in or out of the room with a rustle of silk petticoats, they could only have agreed.
    Lilla also had charm. Her stammer gave her the air of an innocent about to surrender. And to keep up with Ada, she tried to please. Ada simply swanned around. Then that was Ada, everyone says—she never had to try. Unlike Lilla, whose need to work at whatever she turned her mind to meant that, even in her nineties, she would still have a young man eating out of the palm of her hand within minutes. At nineteen, however, the pair of them were dynamite, an ever-shifting double image tantalizing admirers who found it hard to tell which one they were addressing. They had endless, breathless energy with which to picnic, ride, play tennis, chatter, and dance until dawn. Their feet barely touched the ground. And the soldiers who came to Chefoo, Lilla said, called them “the H-H-Heavenly Twins”—a nickname stolen from a contemporary popular novel about a pair of wicked but irresistibly engaging children. One of Ada’s grandsons sent me a cartoon from New Zealand. It was drawn in China, that summer of 1901. It shows several officers weeping because they weren’t given leave to go to the races in Chefoo and see the leaping pair of parasoled figures in pink and blue, marked THE HEAVENLY TWINS.
    Then, just as Lilla thought they were having such a good time that she never wanted it to stop, Ada fell in love. And it wasn’t just a passing infatuation. Ada was head over heels in the going-to-get-married, unstoppable sort of love with a naval officer called Toby Elderton. Toby was tall, handsome, and a bit of a hero in Chefoo. He had been in charge of the ships that had ferried the rescue troops at breakneck speed to Peking, and he had already won one of the top British military medals, the Distinguished Service Order, twice over. He dazzled Ada with his self-assurance and charm. He was already