Alexander Chaloner sold light for a living, and in the years he was alive there was never enough of it to go round. He was born in 1606 at Haslingden, a hill town of stone-roofed houses strung along a ridge in the Rossendale district of Lancashire, where the wind came straight off the moor and the winters were long enough that a family might burn a pound of tallow a week for the mere privilege of seeing its supper. His father was a small tradesman and his mother a spinner; neither is named in the papers that survive, and the household's finances were of the kind that leave no papers. What is known is that the boy was quick with figures and sharp with his nose, and that he was apprenticed at fourteen to a chandler in the town, to learn the trade that would occupy the rest of his life.
The chandler's craft, in the 1620s, was smelly, greasy, and precise. Tallow, the rendered fat of beef and mutton, was brought in by the butcher's cart in slabs and boiled in a great copper in the yard, skimmed, strained, and poured into moulds or into a vat, into which a rack of wicks was dipped over and over until the candle had grown to the right thickness. Rushlights were cheaper still, made by dipping peeled rushes in melted fat, and were the ordinary light of the poor. Wax candles, from beeswax, were a luxury for the church and for the well-to-do. The chandler also sold soap, starch, vinegar, salt, and small groceries, and kept accounts of what he was owed by the hand-loom weavers of the district, who paid, when they paid, in yarn. Alexander learned all of it, and the smell of tallow stayed in his clothes for life. He worked a seven-year apprenticeship and at twenty-one was admitted as a journeyman, a lean young man with a long nose and a habit of squinting at wicks.
He met Mary Faulkner over the counter. She was a schoolmistress, born in 1608 at Bolton, and taught the girls of the neighbourhood to spin, and she came into his shop in the autumn of 1626 for a bundle of rushlights and a length of tarred cord. She bought them at a price that was frankly too low, argued him further down, and left. He said afterwards that he had never lost so much money to so little effect, and he was back in Bolton within the fortnight to see whether she needed more rushlights. They were married in 1627. He was twenty-one and she nineteen, and he brought to the marriage a small stock, a good reputation for honest weights, and a tolerance for eccentricity. She brought a school, a spindle and a great many stakes.
It took him rather longer than it should have to understand what the stakes were. He was a sober, patient man, disinclined to ask questions, and had assumed, to begin with, that the long canvas roll she carried under her cloak held curtain poles or something similar. What he eventually understood, some years into the marriage and in the aftermath of a bad night at a crossroads, was that his wife was a member of the Faulkner family that kept the Red Ledger, and that she went out after dark to hunt. He received the news in the shop with a candle in his hand, and is said to have looked at it for some time before replying that this at least explained the extra wick she had been asking him to make. From that day, he took it upon himself to keep a light for her. Every night she went out, he trimmed a lamp and set it in the window facing the moor, and in the morning he never asked how the hunt had gone. He merely put the kettle on.
Their daughter Quenild Chaloner was born in 1629, two years after the wedding, and took the chandler's surname, which was unusual in a family that passed its own name through the daughters, and which Mary allowed on the ground that it was his daughter as well as hers. Alexander taught the child her figures over the counter, sitting her on a stool by the scales; she could weigh tallow to the quarter ounce at eight and detect a short measure at ten. He was, by universal account, a fond and slightly anxious father, and in the hard years of the 1630s he took pains to see that there was always a candle burning in the child's room, because he had a private idea, never quite spoken, that a lit room was a protected one. He may have been right. Nothing that came looking for the Chaloner cottage ever found it.
The hard winters and the plague years of the early Stuart reigns tested the shop more than the home. When sickness came to the hill towns, the poor bought candles for the sick-watching, and could not pay for them; Alexander gave credit, wrote off debts, and kept his own counsel on the subject. His ledger, kept in a sloping neat hand, contains an entry for a widow of Haslingden who owed him for eleven pounds of tallow and repaid him, over four years, in a shirt, a hen, and a pair of stockings. Then the civil wars began in 1642, and Lancashire was split. Bolton was stormed by Prince Rupert in 1644 and Haslingden lay in the path of both armies; soldiers quartered themselves on households, and there was a run on candles. He sold to whoever paid and hid the rest in the cellar. It was said that he could tell a Royalist from a Roundhead by the way each asked the price, and that he gave both the same one.
Mary died in 1656, after a long night on the marsh, and Alexander was left with a shop, a daughter of twenty-seven, and a house that seemed to him, for the first time, too well lit. He continued to keep the lamp burning in the window. His neighbours noticed it, and some of them, with the tact of the Lancashire hill country, remarked that it was a custom he ought not to give up. It was a habit he kept for nine more years. Quenild, who had been told her mother's business at fifteen, sometimes looked from the door at the lit window and understood that her father was keeping a promise nobody had asked him to make. He took to sitting up with a candle on winter evenings, doing his accounts, and sometimes reading the Psalms aloud to nobody.
Alexander died in 1665, of a wasting illness, at fifty-nine. It was the year the great plague fell on London, and the news of it came north by the carriers, with rumours of red crosses on doors and of carts crying "bring out your dead"; but the sickness that took him was a slower and more private one, a gradual loss of flesh and strength through the summer, and the Haslingden parish did not count it among the plague deaths. He was buried in the churchyard, and Quenild lived on until 1692, keeping the shop's ledgers, together with a note in her father's hand that she never let anyone move: "Trim the lamp." The Faulkners of the Red Ledger have long counted him among the household's friends, a man who married into a family of hunters and asked for nothing but to be permitted to leave a light on. In the Slayerverse it is a common thing, still, to say of a faithful home that someone there is trimming the lamp.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
