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Updated: September 20, 2025
Involuntarily, she put up her hand to her eyes as if to shut out the sight of this importunate fellow. "I have heard something of that tale," she whispered, "but dimly, for we in Harby do not care to speak of it. When my grandsire's sister shamed her family by wedding with a Puritan her people blotted her from their memory. You will not find her picture on the walls of Harby."
Colonel Cromwell was my father's friend; he knew the story of my people; he set it upon me as a special seal for righteousness that I should do this thing. 'Kin shall be set against kin in this strife, he said, 'father against son, and brother against brother. Go forth in the name of the Lord and pluck the banner of Baal from the wall of Harby. And I went."
"That you shall never do," Brilliana answered, steadily, "while there is a living soul in Harby." The Puritan protested with appealing hands. "You are in the last straits for lack of food, for lack of fuel, for lack of powder." Brilliana made a passionate gesture of denial. "You are as ignorant as insolent," she asserted. "Loyalty House lacks neither provisions nor munitions of war."
"Are you a King's man," the other questioned, still holding his weapon in awkward watchfulness of the stranger. Halfman laughed pleasantly. "Who but a King's man could hope to have civil speech with the Lady Brilliana Harby?" He plucked off his hat as he spoke and waved it in the air with a flourish.
He learned much that was familiar and important to him of the Harby family history; he learned much that was unfamiliar and unimportant to him of local matters, such as that Master Marfleet, the village school-master, was inclined to say all that might be said in praise of the Parliament men, and that, when all was said and done, the only avowed out-and-out loyalist in the neighborhood was no man at all, but a beautiful, high-spirited girl-woman, the Lady Brilliana Harby.
Even to the siege itself they were perforce indifferent, seeing very little of it, for the parliamentary leader took care that none of them came into Harby park, and did not, as we may gather from occasional asperities in the "Diurnal," greatly encourage even the visits of Mr. Marfleet himself. The full chronicle of that siege does not concern us here.
After the surrender of the King by the Scots, and the end, as it seemed, of the civil war, Colonel Cloud, with the permission of his great chief, retired from active affairs and made his way to France, to Paris, where, in the early spring of 1647, he was married to Lady Brilliana Harby. Some of the French writers of the time make rather merry over this romantic union and the five years fidelity of squire and dame Strephon and Chloe, as they are pleased to call them. But the laugh is rather on the wrong side of the face, for it is well known that there was bitter disappointment in the hearts and on the lips of many French gallants who had tried their best to win the beautiful English girl, and greatly resented her reservation for this solemn gentleman. One or two efforts, however, to make this resentment plain to the English soldier resulting uncomfortably, after a brisk morning's work, in the temporary disablement of one aggressor and the repeated disarming of another, in the end the "homme
Back ran Tiffany to where the visitor lingered, bade him enter the pleasaunce, where he would find her mistress, and having delivered her errand, ran again to the house, leaving him to his adventure. Sir Blaise Mickleton was, in his own eyes and in the eyes of the village girls of Harby, a vastly fine gentleman.
He probably goes too far, however, when he interprets the silence of Harby villagers as the Cambridge company marched through the main street as the silence too great for speech of a liberated people.
The great hall at Harby was justly celebrated in Oxfordshire and in the neighboring counties as one of the loveliest examples of the rich domestic architecture which adorned the age of Elizabeth. "That prodigal bravery in building," which Camden commends, made no fairer display than at Harby which had been designed by the great architect Thorp.
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