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Updated: June 22, 2025
Her thoughts wandered back to her first meeting with Richard Bracefort, the handsome captain of Light Dragoons, her engagement, her wedding in a London drawing-room, and her first visit to Bracefort Hall. Then had come some two years of happy life in country-quarters.
Again, as a pendant to the Captain's picture hangs a portrait of a lady, showing a beautiful oval face with three chestnut curls on each side of it and a mass of chestnut hair above, and two blue eyes as clear and as pure as a child's; and underneath this portrait is written the name of Lady Eleanor Bracefort, wife and widow of Captain Richard the Light Dragoon.
Such it is now, and such, if old pictures are to be trusted, it was with little difference eighty years ago, at which time we are about to examine its history. But if visitors come to Ashacombe it is to see not the village but the Hall, for Bracefort Hall has some fame of its own.
Though there was more than one snug little room at Bracefort which other people might have turned into a schoolroom, yet Lady Eleanor always preferred, in the summer at any rate, to take the children with her to the hall for their lessons.
Just below it was a second but smaller and simpler tablet: "To the memory of Private John Dart, of the 128th Foot, and late of this parish, who fell in the retreat to Corunna under Sir John Moore, January 1809;" and in very small letters were added the words "Erected by Eleanor Bracefort."
There at the back of a square family pew, among strange old monuments, all showing heraldic shields coloured white and blue, was a tablet: "To the memory of Captain Richard Bracefort of the 116th Light Dragoons, who fell in the glorious action of Salamanca, on the 22nd of July, 1812, and was buried with his dead comrades on the field of battle."
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