Lilla's Feast Read Online Free PDF

first another boy, Reggie, and then Lilla and Ada were born. They bought pet dogs. Alice decorated the small house, painting friezes of flowers on the edges of tabletops, on the backs of chairs, and around the walls in each room— as she did in every house she lived in. She and Charles made a few good friends in the small community that worked in Chefoo throughout the year. When they came round for dinner, Alice, who was never a person to do anything by halves, would have shown her Chinese cook how to produce great banquets of overflowing dishes. Some steaming with the same spices whose densely colored powders would have stained her fingers and tongue as a child. Others exuding the comfortingly familiar aromas of gravies, steak and kidney puddings and roasts, sweeping her guests through the icy night air back to their nurseries, their mothers’ laps, and rolling green hills several thousand miles away.
    Even at family meals, as far as Charles’s harbormaster’s salary allowed, Alice would have brought out soups and starters, teaching her children to ease crabmeat from its shell, flip the bones out of a fish, wolf watery noodles without spilling a drop, eat hot, spicy foods without letting their eyes water. Lilla’s earliest memories must have been a riot of different tastes and textures: mousses so light that you could scarcely feel them on your spoon, barely steamed vegetables that crunched between her milk teeth, vermicelli that slithered down her throat like the snakes she and Ada ran from in the grass, and great hunks of dense German rye bread that sank to the bottom of her stomach, weighing her down like the stones with which she filled her bucket on the beach.
    Most evenings Alice sang, and, Lilla later said, she became “well known in China” for her voice. Charles must have listened, mesmerized and bursting with pride, to every note. And, despite the possible convenience of their marriage, Lilla was told that her parents fell deeply in love and lived a more or less idyllic, though relatively modest, family life.
    And so it should have continued. The boys growing up and joining Chinese Customs or a local trading firm. Lilla and Ada marrying and staying close to home. Charles and Alice graying hand in hand as they watched the sun set each evening behind the town’s high hills, the last glints of sunlight separating into a rainbow of different colors on the sea.
    But on the bitter, icy morning of December 20, 1884, when Lilla and Ada were just three months short of their third birthday, Charles Jennings apparently scribbled a note to a friend of his in Chefoo called Andrew Eckford, asking him to look after his family. He then picked up his harbormaster’s pistol, loaded it and went outside. His boots crackled through the frost as he walked across the rough-grass lawn to the shed at the bottom of the garden. He stepped inside, shut the door, and blew his brains out.
    The sound of the pistol shot ricocheted around the garden walls. Alice came running to find the family’s house servant shivering outside the padlocked shed. Charles had told him to lock him in and not to open the door “until you are certain that I am dead.”
    Alice ordered the servant to unlock the door. Charles lay on the ground, his pistol a few inches from his motionless fingers.
    Lilla was later told that one of the family’s pet dogs had turned rabid and bitten her father. There was no cure. Faced with the prospect of a creeping, agonizing, even dangerous, death—during which he might well have gone mad and attacked his family—Charles had chosen to take his own life. And thus Lilla’s happy family idyll was brought to an abrupt end.
    Alice was devastated to lose Charles, she told her children. That she was stranded in China with hardly a penny didn’t matter. In fact, that was the easiest part of the situation to solve. The combination of a shortage of women and the sense of community spirit in British outposts around the world had led