Agatha Tattersall Faulkner grew up smelling of leather and lived out her life smelling of herbs. Born in 1665 in Garstang, Lancashire, on the banks of the Wyre where the Lancaster Canal would not be cut for another century, she was the elder daughter of a saddler whose shop stood off the market place and whose name was better known in the Ledger than in the town. Garstang was a small market town of stone and slate on the old road north from Preston, its Thursday market famed for cattle and cheese, and its people, weavers, tanners and drovers, lived close to the soil and to one another. In the marshy ground along the Wyre, the meadows lay green in spring and yellow with marsh marigold, and the girl who would become a herbalist learned her first plants there.
Her father, George Faulkner, was a saddler and, like generations of his line before him, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, remembered under the alias The True Seal. The name came, according to the family, from his habit of stamping each stake he cut with a small mark from a saddler's punch, so that any tally in the Ledger could be traced to its instrument, and from his rigid honesty about numbers. He worked the drovers' roads that ran through Garstang, the great arteries by which Scottish cattle were walked south to London, and he was a large, patient man who gave more time to his leather than his blade. The shop produced saddles, bridles, girths and stirrup-leathers; the back room produced the slayer's kit, and Agatha grew up among awls, wax-ends, hides and the persistent warmth of a stove.
Her mother, Alice Tattersall, was a housekeeper who had run a gentleman's household outside Preston before her marriage and who kept her own with the same rigour. She rose before dawn to light the fires, kept the accounts, taught her daughters to read from a horn-book and to sew a fine seam, and knew every herb that grew in the hedges, which she gathered for the pot and for the sickbed. It was from Alice, sitting on a stool in the yard with a bundle of comfrey and a paring knife, that Agatha received her first lesson: that most of what ails a person is written somewhere in the plants at the edge of the field. Alice died in 1675, when Agatha was ten, and the last thing she gave the girl was her worn book of receipts.
Agatha's sister Edith Tattersall Faulkner, born in 1667, was two years younger, and after their mother's death the two girls were raised largely by their father and by an aunt whose name has not been kept. Edith was livelier and more social, Agatha quieter and more absorbed, and it was Agatha who took the horn-book, the receipts and the herb garden into her own keeping. Neither was called. George trained neither to hunt and admitted to a friend that he preferred it so; he wanted, he said, one household in the Ledger that would not need a funeral. It did not work out quite that way, but the sentiment remained.
She taught herself her trade in the hedges. Herbalism in the later seventeenth century was a craft with a learned edge, with Culpeper's Complete Herbal in the hands of every literate country woman and the apothecaries of Preston and Lancaster jealous of their monopoly, and a woman practising it had to be careful. Agatha was careful. By her twenties she had a plot behind the saddlery planted with sage, rue, feverfew, tansy, comfrey, betony and lady's mantle, and a shed in which she dried them on racks in the smoke of the forge. She ground, steeped, distilled and infused, made salves from lard and wax, sold syrups of horehound and elder to the market wives, and treated the chilblains, agues and scalds of the parish. She learned to be paid in kind, to turn away those who wanted charms, and to keep her prices below the apothecary's and her claims below the physician's.
Her herb craft was of use to the Ledger in ways that her father grew to depend on. A slayer's wounds were bruises, gashes and burns of a peculiar sort, and a hunter who could not go to the surgeon needed a healer who would not talk. Agatha made him a poultice of comfrey and plantain for the bruising, a wash of yarrow for the cuts, and a black salve of pine tar and beeswax that closed a bite faster than the barber-surgeons could stitch it. She was called out in the small hours to a shed in a field, a barn at a crossroads, or a kitchen in a village where a man lay on the table with his coat off. She dressed his wounds and said nothing. The Ledger's margins record that she was never once asked to leave, and that she never once asked for payment beyond the cost of the linen.
Her father George died in 1685, when she was twenty, and the family's world contracted. The saddlery passed to a journeyman, the house was let, and Agatha and Edith took rooms near the market place, where the herbalist's shed was moved stone by stone into the back yard. She never married. The family remembered that she was courted by a curate and by a widowed miller, and declined them both with a courtesy that left them her patients ever afterwards. She had no children and no wish for any, and, in the way of the Faulkner house, a niece or two came to her for training. She was a tall, dry, weather-browned woman who wore the same grey gown for a decade and whom the town called, without malice, the yarb-wife.
She lived through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a young woman deep in her plants, hearing of it by the coach, and through the first Jacobite rising of 1715, which brought the rebel army through the county and the wounded of Preston to every door between the Ribble and the Wyre. That November, she was fifty and she worked for three days with her sister and a borrowed cart, treating men of both sides in the church, and afterwards she wrote in her book of receipts, in a hand that had grown small and upright, that a wound is a wound and a herb does not read politics. The Ledger's keeper copied that sentence into a fair page.
Her health failed slowly after 1715. A wasting illness took the flesh from her face and hands over two years, and she spent her last winter in bed in the room above the herb-shed, dictating the recipe-book to Edith. She died in 1717 at the age of fifty-two and was buried in Garstang, in the churchyard where she had gathered wall-pennywort.
Agatha Tattersall Faulkner has a place in the Slayerverse as the daughter of The True Seal who never fought but mended those who did, and the receipts she left, copied in the Ledger house for many decades, kept Faulkner hunters on their feet long after the yarb-wife of Garstang was gone.
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