Lilla's Feast

by Frances Osborne

  Ernie’s camp furniture had been replaced by some bought by his sister Ada and her husband, Fred, when they had stayed on a houseboat in Srinagar over the summer. True to Howell form, it wasn’t the most comfortable of furniture, but Lilla had to do what she could with it. She dug through the trunks and boxes of their possessions that had been sent up from Calcutta. Two years after their wedding, she was now unwrapping some of their 250 wedding presents for the first time. Unraveling great bandages of yellowing tissue paper from delicately painted china plates. Heaving great silver bowls and candlesticks from dust-covered crates and arranging them around her “drawing-room,” their grandeur charmingly out of scale with the cottage rooms. Finding great swaths of silks and cottons brought from China that she draped over the awkward furniture. And from the bottom of one of the boxes, she unearthed a heavy embroidered silk cloth that Ernie recognized as his trophy from when he had ransacked the Forbidden City with Toby after the Boxer Uprising. Lilla sewed quilting onto the back and turned it into a thick bedspread for their bed. At night, they snuggled together under this constant reminder of his military prowess. “She has made this hut so comfy,” wrote Ernie, glowing with husbandly pride.

  Shortly after Christmas, the snow began to fall. Its heavy flakes curled around the house, turning their view across the valley into a fuzz of gray. Over the first few days, the morning sun melted it into slush and mud that froze back into an ice rink at night. And then, as the earth hardened, the frost spreading down through its layers, Bandipur turned white. The nearby lake froze over, first slowing into an eerie, viscous calm, and then great patches of white began to spread across it, the last glimpses of dark water eventually sealed away beneath the smooth sheet of ice. The snow deepened. Foot after foot was dug away from the sides of the house, and, finally, the falls seemed to ebb. The weather had done its work. The valley was still. Most of its creatures had burrowed themselves away against the cold; even the black Himalayan bears had vanished until spring. The cries of the few birds still darting from one white-limbed tree to another were muffled by the snow. Even the raging torrent at the bottom of their garden had slowed into a stiff icy flow. Winter had come.

  Inside their cottage, Ernie and Lilla settled into snowbound domestic bliss. Ernie was besotted with his busy little son, accrediting all his achievements to Lilla: “He has inherited his mother’s cheery disposition.” Arthur charged around the house in the long, frilly white skirts and dresses that babies and toddlers of both sexes wore then. “So plucky,” boasted Ernie in his letters to his family, “bangs of all sorts he administers to himself but not one whimper.” From time to time, Arthur slept in his parents’ room. “He sleeps always on his face as I do,” wrote Ernie. “He awakes I don’t know how early but Lily has taught him not to make a sound until the bearer knocks at the door at 7 am,” when “the little chap jumps in his bed & says ‘atcha’ or ‘over’ or ‘oh dear.’ ” Upon hearing his son, Ernie would leap up and rush over to the cot to “take the little monkey into our bed.” And, in an astonishing gesture that would still score points for new manliness today, he changed him. “I usually pull off a mass of sodden garments—how he can stick them I don’t know.” If anything irked Lilla, she didn’t show it. She is “always good-tempered,” Ernie wrote to his mother.

  Day and night, Lilla kept fires roaring in each room and the kitchen churning out steaming dish after steaming dish of poultry and game, plundered from the “farmyard” of turkeys, geese, ducks, pigeons, fowls, and cows kept around the house and occasionally bagged by Ernie himself on snowy forays with a shotgun. The only other source of provisions—the villagers had little to spare—were deliveries, weather permitting, from Srinagar. At first, Lilla would have kept Ernie’s food simple, familiar, stuck to dishes that she knew he would like. Roasting pheasants coated in fatty rashers of bacon. Stuffing long-necked wild ducks with sage and onions. Simmering sausage-stuffed wood pigeons in thick tomato soup and claret. Stewing and baking tiny rabbit joints with sultanas. Jugging hare, steaming it in a sealed earthenware dish for hours on end.

  Once she sensed that she had lulled Ernie into a steady rhythm of expectation and gluttony she must have begun to branch out, spicing the dishes up into the curries he had professed to miss in London. Bit by bit she would have added new ingredients. Her recipe book is full of surprising dishes that put bananas into savory sauces and mix stir-fried peanuts with chicken to make a pilau. Then the pilaus slide from Indian to Chinese, with Lilla shredding the chicken, pulping the rice, and coating the dish in the Worcestershire sauce that she used instead of soy. Ernie must have wolfed it all down, showering praise over chopped duck and sliced chestnuts and strips of chicken strewn with dark mushrooms. Making Lilla feel that, at last, she had him entranced.

  After dinner, Lilla played the piano to Ernie and sang, even persuading him to join in. Ernie agreed to let her teach him the violin. He was not a natural musician, but he tried his best. “He is now learning the violin obligato to my song ‘O dry those tears,’ it really sounds quite grand,” wrote Lilla. The two of them practiced together every evening, and Lilla—perhaps with a touch of womanly deception—clearly made Ernie feel that he was rather good. “I am much interested in it,” he wrote.

  Engulfed in a haze of roaring log fires, music, paternal pride, and mouthwatering food—“she feeds me so well”—Ernie fell completely under Lilla’s spell: “It was really the best day’s work I ever did when I proposed to her. No man has ever had a nicer wife.” While he was stuck up on the Kashmiri mountainside, his old prejudices melted away: “There is no mistake she is not rich but money will not buy her charms, her natural grace, perfect figure, perfect teeth & complexion.” And Ernie even seemed to realize, in his own way, that their future happiness was in some measure up to him: “I must do all I can to make things easy for her. She must find Bandipur a great change from Bedford.” Lilla herself felt in charge. “He [Ernie] was certainly run down before, but now he is a different boy, and enjoys life, and does not worry one bit—I hope there will be no necessity for me to leave him again, as it does him no good to be alone.”

  And for a precious few months, Ernie even stopped referring to Lilla in the double diminutive of “little Lily.” “Lily,” once Lilla had acceded to it, was there for good. Perhaps she sensed that Ernie was happiest thinking of her as smaller than him, given that he wasn’t a very tall man himself. And, unlike his father, who took an extremely active interest in his daughters’ education, Ernie’s view of women, with the exception of his sisters, was that of most men of his generation—they were lesser creatures.

  Despite the new lease on life in his marriage, Ernie was still deeply frustrated at being snowed in. “I hate this weather,” he wrote. And despite Lilla’s best efforts to keep him entertained, he prowled around the house like a wounded tiger, bemoaning the difficulty of walking through the “several feet of snow” that surrounded the house, until at last the sleigh they were having built in the village was finished. Then, leaving Mrs. Desmond to wheel Arthur up and down the boarded-up veranda—only his eyes were visible “as he was so wrapped up in rugs, etc.”—they set out “nearly every afternoon” to go shooting on the frozen lake. These trips, however, rapidly turned out to be more amusing than practical. “There are thousands of birds,” wrote Lilla, “but they know the gun too well and fly away before we can get near them.”

  Ernie was not to be put off his prey so easily. Determined to catch some geese, he cobbled together what he called a mitrailleuse from ten Brown Bessies—“medieval weapons with which the Kashmiri troops are armed.” He tied the guns into a rack on a wheelbarrow and camouflaged himself in one of Lilla’s nightdresses “to match the snow.” He loaded the guns with a “double charge of powder and buckshot,” attached all ten triggers to a single string, and crept toward the birds. When he had managed to maneuver himself within eighty feet of them, he pulled the string. The resulting bang sent the wheelbarrow careering into his chest “and made me roar with pain.” B
ut he had a goose.

  Arthur, Bandipur, Kashmir, 1904

  Still wearing her nightdress, he returned to Lilla triumphantly, clutching the dead bird. It took three hours to roast. She turned the giblets into gravy, pounded some of the autumn’s apples into a sauce, and presented Ernie with a feast of his spoils.

  By April, the snow was beginning to melt. While the rest of India began to heat itself to boiling point, a gentle spring settled on Bandipur. Lilla and Ernie’s family life moved outside. Arthur ran around with the animals and on the lawns. Lilla and Ernie showered him with presents. At barely one and a half years old, he had a pony, a puppy, and even a goat cart built for him, in which he sat—still in white frills, with a tent of a sun hat and parasols to shield him from the sun—clutching on to the reins.

  As soon as it was warm enough to sleep away from a fire and before so much snow had melted that the rivers had returned to raging torrents, Ernie and Lilla escaped from their little hut and into “camp” on another Kashmiri houseboat. They ambled down the rising rivers, visiting waterfalls and springs, old temples and ruined palaces, sometimes abandoning the boat to camp in tents in the hills for several days at a time, listening to great spring avalanches roar down the mountains at night. When they returned with the rare birds that they had shot, Lilla had them stuffed and sent them back to Ernie’s sister Laura and her husband, Sidney.

  Now Lilla could do no wrong. Every one of Ernie’s letters to his family was packed with praise for her. And by joining in Ernie’s family tradition of collecting rare species of plant and animal, and following the instructions she was given to add to Laura’s letter collection back in England—“when you have a good many of our effusions, send them home in a packet”—she was showing them that she could do far more than just run a house and cook. Lilla even managed to take the upper hand in her relationship with her mother-in-law, writing to Barbie, “give my fondest love to your mother and say, I do mean to write.”

  But a single dark cloud loomed on the horizon. I had been wondering why Lilla had not pasted any snapshots of herself in Kashmir into her photo album. Then, in one of her letters to Barbie, the answer emerged. Perhaps I should have guessed it sooner. After all, it seemed to be an immediate, inevitable result of any union, or reunion, between Lilla and Ernie. I must have been distracted by all the banter about Ada. By Ernie’s amazingly indiscreet written whispers to his sisters not to “say one word about this [for] awhile”—but, “in spite of all precautions,” his wife’s twin was “in for an infant apparently to her great disgust.” So distracted was I by thinking that Ada’s “disgust” must have been masking a fear of having to watch another child die, I failed to notice all this while there had been not one murmur about Lilla. But she was pregnant, too, just a month behind her twin.

  Ada’s baby was due in July, Lilla’s in August. Ada must have conceived during Lilla’s visit, and Lilla within days of seeing Ernie again.

  For all her enthusiasm, her passion, for Ernie, Lilla was not happy to be pregnant either. “I wonder if you will be very much surprised,” she wrote to Barbie, “to hear that I am in the ‘family way’ again. Oh dear dear poor little me. Such is life—well, it can’t be helped and I am trying to make the best of it.” At least, unlike Ada, she didn’t have to go back to England for the birth in a desperate attempt to keep the child alive. Nevertheless, her memories of life immediately after Arthur had been born would still have been raw. And after what she thought she had done to her last baby, she must have been terrified that some great hand of Fate would wreak revenge.

  As spring turned into summer, social life in Bandipur took off. The British in India who were free to leave their posts flocked north to Kashmir to escape the baking heat in the rest of the country. Once there, they toured the countryside, and Ernie and Lilla’s cottage became a stopping place along the way. “We have been very gay,” wrote Lilla on the first of July, “this last week having people to nearly every meal, in fact the whole of June we have had guests.” Yesterday, she continued, “we had two ladies to breakfast, for lunch and tea a Captain Steepnagle & the nurse who went to Gilgit. For dinner some R.A.M.C. [Royal Army Medical Corps] man, this sort of thing is my daily program.” Luckily perhaps, for Lilla, they had no spare bedrooms, and their visitors were limited to meals that, even seven and a half months’ pregnant, she could still produce—by ordering in ingredients from Srinagar, twenty miles away—with a flourish.

  The odd visitor, however, did stay the night. A “Prince Pedro of Or-leans,” wrote Lilla, turned up late one evening on his way back through the mountains to Gilgit. He collapsed at the door, too ill to move. Lilla put him up in a tent for two days until he could travel to a doctor. After the isolation of the winter, Lilla found all these visitors diverting but hard work, and she looked forward to being snowed in with Ernie once more: “I shall be quite glad when the autumn comes and we are by ourselves again.”

  Summer brought more work for Ernie, too. “This is my busy season,” he wrote. Throughout the winter, he had made occasional forays to Srinagar. Now, in addition to organizing any official visits, he had to make the most of the warm weather to check the passes and trails north through the Himalayas toward Russian-occupied Afghanistan. India was a prized possession of the British Empire, a vast, wealth-creating machine envied by the world’s other great nations—especially by imperial Russia, whose own vast empire stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific in one solid block, whisking tantalizingly close to India itself. For decades, Britain had feared a potential Russian invasion through the Himalayas. And while their two armies had faced each other across the mountains, young British and Russian heroes had galloped around the Central Asian mountains and deserts in disguise, gathering information and converting local tribes to their cause in a glamorous escapade known as the “Great Game.” A game in which Ernie was now playing a very minor role.

  Ernie’s task was to work out the best way, if any, to take an army through the mountains. He set off on one expedition to Gilgit with a team of Kashmiri guides, donkeys, and ponies. They climbed a thousand feet at a time, along paths so narrow that when one pony knocked into the overhanging cliff and stumbled, it disappeared down the hill-side to its death. He crossed torrential rivers on terrifying footbridges, making the mistake of looking down at the water swirling beneath him. “I had to turn back.” The party climbed to 14,500 feet, and, even in July, the slopes were covered in thick snow through which they skidded their way down, unloading the animals and rolling the bundles down the hill. When he returned, his white-skinned hands and face had been sunburned a deep red.

  At the end of July, Lilla spent a few days in Srinagar visiting the vacant assistant resident’s house where she would give birth the following month. In a postcard to her cousin Lulu Covil, she still sounds upbeat. “Awfully hot,” she scribbled. “Just seen the house we are going to next month, lovely place—best love yrs L.H.” A few days later, Ada Elderton gave birth to another girl in England. “All Ada and Toby can knock up between them is another petticoat,” mocked Ernie from one of his mountain camps. “I hope my Pilili will be man enough to knock out another man.” But, after gritting her teeth and barely uttering a whimper through her hours of labor—leading Ernie naively to write “never was there a child born with such ease”—Lilla gave birth to a girl in the last week of August.

  Ernie could scarcely conceal his disappointment. His marriage had seemed to him so perfect that Lilla’s failure to give him a second son knocked him for a loop. “Lily is satisfied and so I don’t like to grumble,” he confided to Barbie. “I want the child called Esmé,” he added. He lost out, however, even on this. Lilla overruled him, calling their daughter Alice, after her mother. And hot on the heels of this came another blow. He received orders to move. His time in Kashmir was over.

  Ernie must have begun to curse his luck. First a daughter. Then her being named after his mother-in-law, of whom, however his feelings for Lilla had changed, he can scarcely have been fond. Now Ka
shmir—the posting of a lifetime—cut short. To make matters worse, he would have felt that he had only himself to blame. Throughout the past year, he had been plagued by a recurring eye infection that, at times, had led Lilla to write his letters for him. Then, unable—despite Lilla’s best efforts—to face another claustrophobic winter in the hills, he had asked for two months’ leave over the following January and February. The response from headquarters had been brief. Move to a new post. And at the beginning of October, as soon as Lilla’s confinement was over, she found herself packing up their little fishing hut in Bandipur and heading south to the desert city of Lucknow.

  Chapter 8

  THE TABLES TURN

  LUCKNOW, INDIA, OCTOBER 1904

  It is not often that lovers swap roles. Usually, the pattern formed at first—one person chasing, the other aloof—sticks fast. Just as you think that a change is about to happen—the lover drawing back for once, the beloved starting to fuss around—some small circumstance takes a turn. And they both revert to type. The beloved clambers back onto his or her pedestal, reprising a moody gaze at a more appealing horizon. The lover scurries around, picking up the debris, trying to mend the broken this and that into some pretty object that will make the loved one smile.