Black Sheep Part III

Meanwhile, Stacy Calverleigh is very worried. He has found that Fanny wont come into her full inheritance for 8 years and his own financial position is very precarious. He is a gambler and his estate, Danescourt, is heavily mortgaged. He thinks that if he could persuade Fanny to elope with him, her guardian would probably accept the marriage and help him out financially in order to avoid scandal, so he tries to persuade her to run away. Fanny is infatuated with him but she knows how improper it is to run away and she does not feel very happy at the prospect. But Stacy nags on and persuades her, but he cannot get her to agree to go until after a party that is being held by her aunts. Fanny goes down with the flu, starting to feel ill at the party and the following day she is quite ill and confined to bed. Stacy has not noticed her illness and becomes impatient when she is not around after the party. Impatient and desperate, he feels he must seek another way out of his problems. He is staying at an inn and finds that there is a lady Mrs Clapham, who has just come to stay there. She is about 30 and very pretty.. and not very bright. She is clearly well off, and has a chaperone, a middle aged woman who seems to be guarding her. Stacy finds her attractive, and finds that she is a widow of a very wealthy older man, who has left her a lot of money but without a trustee to take care of it. Her husband was in trade and she knows little of the upper class world. He hopes that he may be able to rush her into a courtship, and marry her and get his hands on her fortune so he plays up his own having a landed estate to attract her. He spends a couple of weeks courting her and is a bit embarrassed when he meets upper class lady friends as its obvious that Mrs Clapham is not a lady. Fanny recovers from her flu, but is weak and depressed and upset that Stacy never sent a message or asked for her, unlike her other friends. She then meets him, and he tells her that he had to give her up because of her family being against the marriage, but Fanny, naive as she is, can see that he was only toying with her affections and now he has another wife in prospect and that she meant nothing to him. Abby tries to console her, telling her that she will feel better and Fanny tries to be brave but she is very low. While she has been ill, James, her trustee, comes to Bath and tells Abby that her flirtation with Miles Calverleigh is scandalous when he had been the suitor of Celia, and that if she marries him, he will cut her and Selina off as sisters. Selina tells Abby that she loves her most of her family, and that if James does cut them off, she will accept it because she loves Abby so much. But she still hopes that her sister wont marry a man whom the family dislike. Abby feels very worn down. She feels that she has a duty to her neice to try and cheer her up after her unhappy love affair, and that it would be selfish of her to marry Miles if the marriage would upset Selina so much. Miles explains to her that he arranged Mrs Clapham's coming to Bath and flirting with Stacy. He tells her that he made a lot of money in India and can provide her with a comfortable home.. and that because he could see that she was worrying so much about Stacy and Fanny, he set his nephew up in order to draw him away from Fanny. He tells her that he has had a former lady friend who has a fancy house in London, and that she was able to find Nancy Clapham, a former actress, who played the rich widow and that she will turn Stacy down when he proposes and laugh at his folly. Abby is amused at Miles' plotting and grateful to him for arranging things so that now, Fanny understands that her suitor was just a selfish young man who was fortune hunting. But she feels that she cannot marry Miles because of Selina.