Miss Fanshawe's account concluded

The days are passing, and still the story of Theodora has not been completed. That’s the trouble with trying to tell it in instalments, on a blog – three days can pass between postings and in the blink of an eye, the story line has become disjointed, the original impetus been lost! Without further ado therefore, I take up the story again, as nearly as possible at just that point where Miss Fanshawe left it the other day.

“ Lady Macauley has her little circle of friends of course” was the way I seem to remember her proceeding. “People she has known for many years, and can depend upon – ‘the Faithful’, her daughter calls them; so touching, I’ve always thought…”

For more intimate knowledge of the Macauleys we would need Mrs Mountjoy however, as Miss Fanshawe next explained. “Dear Rose", she called her; “who lives in the little house with the green gate in the wall, on the high street. It’s connected to the Macauley garden directly at the back by way of another little gate, and Rose is in and out of the Macauley house by that route at all times – the old lady can hardly do without her for an hour, or so I believe. She’s away in Italy with them at present, for example – she goes everywhere with them; and is of all the people in the village, the one who most of all has Lady Macauley’s ear. She is an old school-friend of Belle Macauley the daughter; she stepped in one day to rescue her from bullies in the playground of the little local school, and was taken up by the family on that account….”

“She was Rosemary Betts, then” Miss Fanshawe continued; “ She started to call herself Rose much later, after she had married her third husband, who was Curtis Mountjoy of the Foreign Office – she became quite grand herself, after that. There was talk of Curtis’s receiving his knighthood at one point, but alas, he died before it could be accomplished, and Rose never did quite become Lady Mountjoy.. Such a pity; she’d have liked that. In those days though, she was plain Rosie Betts, from the little brick council house on the wrong side of the road … Rose likes to joke about it now, that long walk of hers, across the road to the Macauley house. It was only a matter of fifty yards or so, she says, but it might have been the other side of the world, for all the difference it made to her. Poor Belle had a hard time of it at that school, from all accounts. Being the little girl from the big house, you know, and very tall and awkward, for a girl. In person she resembled her father, you see, who was always thought rugged, rather than handsome. Tall, and strong-boned - which were excellent things in a rich and powerful man, of course, but rather less effective in a young girl…….. Poor Belle suffered at the hands of the bullies, anyway - but Rose was always there, to step in and help her when it was needed.. Sir Jack believed in state education for his daughter, you see; it was a part of his socialist principles. Though they didn’t seem to have extended to his son – the younger Jack Macauley attended Westminster School, his mother having drawn the line at letting him go away to Eton………..”

Miss Fanshawe made quite a long digression at this point, being eager to tell us something more about the younger Jack Macauley. She remembers him most vividly from the time when she was in her early teens, and he several years older, and just down from Oxford. She only ever saw him from afar, but even she had been able to see what a very special kind of glamour he'd had. What was it, she wondered, that very special quality of his? She hardly knew how to express it for us. Except to say that, for her, he had seemed to be the Young Lochinvar, and Sir Lancelot, and even King Arthur himself, all rolled up in one young man – and that where he was, the wide exciting outer world had always seemed to her to be, also. All the girls were in love with him, anyway. Even Rose herself, at one time. There had been some little romantic incident, at a ball in the Macauley garden (the Macauleys threw the most magnificent parties in those days!). Rose had fancied herself in love with him at any rate, and he with her. But it scarcely lasted for more than an hour,the poor little affair, before Lady Macauley herself had stepped in to put an end to it.

That was the thing, didn’t we see? Rose could be family pet, and Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty, feisty little Rosie’ as much as she would – but when it came to marrying the son and heir, she just wasn’t the right sort. It is Miss Fanshawe’s private opinion that Lady Macauley had received her come-uppance over the affair later, for all that. Since in no time at all after Rose had been dispatched, Jack had taken up with the girl his mother called his ‘fine cold Alice’; a Scottish land-owner’s daughter who had married him, and borne him away, the day after the wedding, to some castle her family had up near Caithness, from which she had seldom permitted him to re-emerge.

Miss Fanshawe had become very pre-occupied with her own thoughts by that stage in her story. Her recollections seemed to have taken her to some place far away in the depths of her memory, from which it was difficult to extract herself. And when she did, it was only to tell us, all in a rush, that nothing had ever been quite the same for Lady Macauley after her beloved Jack had married and gone away. Sir Jack himself had died, as a matter of fact, not so very many years later, and Lady Macauley been rendered desolate by it. She had dressed herself in widow’s weeds as black as those of Queen Victoria herself, a century earlier; had closed the house and gone away, not returning for any length of time for more than twenty years. It had been only two years ago in fact, that she and Belle had permanently returned. Lady Macauley had let it be known at the time that she had come home only to die in her husband’s bed. She was old, and she was tired, she said; she had lost both her Jacks, and she didn’t see what else there was to stay on for. But of course not even a Lady Macauley could die to order, no matter now hard she tried – and to the best of Miss Fanshawe’s knowledge, she continued still in excellent health…

Miss Fanshawe suddenly remembered, then, that she must hasten away herself. She had rambled on far too long already; she must have quite worn us out with her chatter! She had friends coming to lunch, besides – Mrs Baines and Roland, from the pretty cottage beside the pond on the Common. Such very good friends of hers, such charming people; she would arrange to have us come and meet them as soon as it could be arranged. Having said which, and thanked us warmly again, she took her leave, hurrying away along our little garden path, her last words fluttering behind her as she went.