Blanche Rishton

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Fallow Weir. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

Blanche Rishton was born in 1566 at Whalley in Lancashire, in a stone cottage on the edge of the old abbey lands, and she died thirty-six years later on a lonely road, in an ambush she had walked into with her eyes open. Between those two dates she was a herbalist known for her drying-loft and her steady hands, and, from 1593, the vampire slayer whom the Red Ledger records as The Fallow Weir. She belonged to the House of Faulkner through her mother, and like many Faulkner women of her generation she carried a different surname from the family that had given her the calling. Whalley in the 1560s was a place still adjusting to the loss of its great house. The Cistercian abbey had been dissolved three decades before her birth, its church stripped and its lands sold off to gentry, and the villagers lived among ruins whose dressed stone turned up in every pigsty wall. Her father, Harry Rishton, was a shepherd on the fells, born in 1539, who spent his life on the high pastures above the Calder valley with a dog, a crook and a coat that never fully dried. Her mother, Nesta Faulkner, born in 1543, was a carder of wool, and the household ran on the wool trade in its humblest form: fleece brought down in June, washed, teased and combed by the women of the row, then sold on to the spinners and weavers of the towns. Blanche grew up smelling lanolin and peat smoke. Oatcake, buttermilk, boiled mutton in the good weeks and pottage in the bad made up the table, and the church bell at Whalley, still the old parish church of St Mary, marked the hours of a Protestant England that many of her neighbours had accepted with only half a heart. She had one sibling, an older sister, Tiffany Faulkner, born in 1564, and the two girls were unlike in ways that were remarked on for the rest of their lives. Tiffany was quick with her tongue and fond of company; Blanche was silent, watchful and preoccupied with the plants that grew where the sheep did not. By the age of ten she could tell a foxglove from a mullein leaf in the dark by touch. An old woman on the lane, who had learned her simples from a nun turned out of the abbey, took the child in hand and taught her which roots to lift in autumn, which flowers to gather at midsummer, and which to leave alone entirely. It was the nearest thing to a schooling that a shepherd's daughter could expect, and it turned into a trade. By her early twenties Blanche was selling salves, cough syrups of horehound and honey, poultices of comfrey and tinctures of feverfew to farms across three parishes, and her drying-loft, hung with bunches of yarrow, tansy and wormwood, was a landmark of the row. The summer of 1588 found her twenty-two and at work in the hedgerows when riders came through Whalley with word that the Spanish fleet had been sighted in the Channel. Beacons were lit along the coast and on the fell tops, and for some nights the whole horizon of the Ribble valley glowed with signal fires. Harry Rishton, like every able man, was summoned to muster with the county levy, and Blanche stayed to help her mother manage the flock. The fear passed, the Armada broke on the northern rocks, and the country celebrated. She said afterwards that the beacons had taught her something more useful than patriotism, which was how quickly a whole district could be made to look one way at once, and how much a person could do unseen while it did. The calling came in 1593, at harvest. The story in the Red Ledger is short and, by its own standards, unusually plain. The last field on a farm beyond the abbey wall had been left unreaped, its barley standing over-ripe and beginning to lodge in the rain, and the reapers who had gone out to finish it were never seen again. Their sickles were found on the headland, laid out in a row. Blanche was sent for because the farmer's wife had a fever, and while she was walking there in the dusk she stopped at the field edge without being able to say why. She knew, with the certainty that every slayer describes, that the stillness in the crop was the stillness of something waiting. She went in with nothing but a herb knife and a stick of hawthorn cut from the hedge, and the barley moved around her. She came out at dawn with the thing dealt with and her hands shaking, and the family remembered that she asked for nothing before she sat down on the cart and slept. From that harvest she was a slayer, and from that field came her name, since the Fallow Weir was what the Whalley people took to calling the woman who kept a space clear. Her training was odd even by the standards of the house. She had no mentor, only the ledger and a cousin of her mother's who wrote to her from Preston with practical advice, and she learned what she needed by doing it badly and then better. Her archetype was the Soldier, blunt, physical and undramatic, and her craft, Hawthorn Craft, grew directly out of her old trade. She knew the tree as a herbalist knows it, its blossom, its haws, its habit of growing in lines along the old boundaries, and she learned to cut and season the wood with the same care she gave to medicine. Her stakes were shaped at a particular angle, hardened in the smoke of her own drying-loft and wrapped against the damp in waxed wool. She planted living hawthorn along field boundaries and lane edges, so that a hunt could be turned into a matter of geography, and she taught the village to leave the hedges uncut on certain nights. As for her gear, she carried a matchlock pistol, an awkward, slow and smoky weapon that had to be primed and kept alight, and she trusted it less than the stakes, which is probably why she was so good with both. She stood squarely, moved deliberately, and never fired until she was sure. The years between 1593 and 1602 were, by the account in the Red Ledger, productive but quiet. She was credited with a series of kills along the Calder and the upper Ribble, most of them lone stragglers on the moor roads, and with the breaking up of a nest that had settled in a ruined grange near Clitheroe. Her entries were terse, in a plain hand taught to her by her sister, who had learned letters from a curate. Tiffany never received the calling but she was the keeper of Blanche's accounts and the person who copied each hunt into the household copy of the book, before it was carried to the family scribe in the Faulkner line. Blanche never married, and the ledger notes no children. She kept house alone in the cottage under the loft, took in apprentices for the herbwork, and had a reputation among the Whalley women as stern but fair, and among the men as a person to be given a wide berth on the road at night. Like every Faulkner slayer, she was aware of the Proctor rivalry and of the Guest, the vampire who slipped away at Towton in 1461, but she treated the matter as a tally rather than a feud. The White Ledger of the Yorkshire house was, to her, a competitor to be outdone in careful counting, not a foe to be watched with hostility. She is said to have exchanged two letters with a Proctor woman in the West Riding, courteous and dry, in which each promised not to cheat on numbers. Whether this is true, the family has always liked the story. She died in 1602 on the road that runs north from Whalley over the moor, in an ambush that had clearly been laid for her, by whom the ledger does not say with confidence. She had been summoned to a farm by a message that turned out to be false, and she went anyway, having guessed. Her pistol was found discharged and her hawthorn stakes lay scattered in the road, and her body was carried home on a hurdle by shepherds who knew her father. Harry Rishton, aged sixty-three, outlived her by a year and died in 1603, and Nesta Faulkner, her mother, followed in 1605. Tiffany kept the ledger and the loft. The Red Ledger gives Blanche a full page, unusual for its date, and a single closing line in her sister's hand recording that the barley in the last field was reaped the following year without incident. Among the writers of the later Slayerverse she is remembered as the herbalist who turned a hedge into a weapon, and the family still plants hawthorn in her memory.