Alexander Sagar never belonged to a slaying house, held no alias and carried no stake, and yet the Faulkner records speak of him with a peculiar respect. He was a clerk born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1671, who married into the Faulkner family in 1697 and spent fifteen years as the steady, ink-stained centre of a household that lived beside the Red Ledger without ever quite being part of it. The family's habit of describing him as unaffiliated is exact: he came from no ledger, no house and no craft, only from the ordinary trade of the market town, and it was that ordinariness that his wife and children came to value most. He died in 1712 of a fever, aged forty-one.
The early records of his own family are thin. No parents are named for him in the Faulkner papers, and the surviving story is that he was raised largely by a parish and a schoolmaster, an orphan or near-orphan in a town where orphanhood was common enough not to be remarked upon. What is certain is that he was schooled at the grammar school in Blackburn, where a schoolmaster with a taste for the classics recognised the boy's clean, rapid hand and his instinct for order and set him to copying. By the age of fourteen he was working in the back room of an attorney's office off the market place, sharpening quills, sanding documents and learning the formulas of conveyance, lease and bond. He was thin, fair and short-sighted, with a habit of pushing his spectacles up his nose with an ink-blackened knuckle.
Blackburn in the 1670s and 1680s was growing without quite knowing what it was growing into. It was the principal market for the hand-loom weavers of the surrounding hundred, who brought their pieces of grey cloth down from the hillside cottages, and the town's trade in linen and cotton mixtures was expanding year by year. The parish church, the market cross, the courthouse and the string of inns that lined the road to Preston made it a place through which the county's business passed. Business meant paper, and paper meant clerks. A young man who could write a fair hand, draw up a lease and hold his tongue about what he read could count on steady wages, and Alexander earned a modest but reliable income, living in lodgings and eating his bread and small beer at a table in a tavern near the market.
He was seventeen when the Glorious Revolution reached the town in 1688. The attorney for whom he worked was a cautious man of Tory inclinations, and the office hummed for a winter with whispered discussions about oaths, allegiance and which gentlemen could be trusted. Alexander copied the documents and asked no questions, then or later. He learned in those months an invaluable clerk's virtue, which was to see everything and repeat nothing, and it was this virtue that would matter when he married into a family that kept a hidden book.
The tavern he frequented was the Three Bridles, kept in its later years by a tenant, and it was there, at a shared table at the noon hour, that he met Edith Tattersall Faulkner, the daughter of the tavern's earlier keeper and four years his senior. She was a small, level-eyed woman who counted the reckoning in her head faster than he could on paper, and the earliest anecdote of their acquaintance is a mutual correction of arithmetic. She had made an error of a shilling on a customer's slate; he told her; she checked and found that he was right, and looked at him for a moment as though he had passed some sort of examination. He began to take his noon meal at her table on purpose. He courted her over months, awkwardly and with great earnestness, offering to check her accounts, and in the course of that offering he learned that some of the accounts she kept were not of beer.
The Red Ledger was not shown to him at once. Edith, careful of her family's secret and of her own judgment, watched him for a year before she let him see a page, and Alexander's reaction pleased her: he read the entries slowly, from start to finish, took off his spectacles, and said that the hand was a good one but that the totals on the third page did not agree. He was not frightened, and he did not laugh. He asked, in the manner of a professional, what the purpose of the book was and who was to be trusted with it, and when she told him, he said that he supposed a clerk was as good a keeper of secrets as any and that he would be honoured to keep this one. They were married in 1697.
The wedding was held at the parish church in Blackburn, and afterward the small party retired to a rented room over a tavern, where the bridegroom was teased for being the only man there who had never held a sword. He did not mind. He moved his wife into rooms near the market and, as his earnings rose, into a small house of their own. Their first child, George Faulkner Sagar, was born in 1698, and their daughter Rebecca Faulkner in 1702. Alexander did not object to the Faulkner name being carried forward through his children; he said it was a good name and a better one for having a Sagar attached to it, and he taught both children to read and figure before they could ride a hobby-horse.
He supported the family's work without touching it. When a Faulkner cousin from another parish required a deed searched or a boundary checked, Alexander could do it with an attorney's discretion. When the ledger's tallies from the Lancashire cousins came in, he sat with Edith at the kitchen table in the evenings and checked their arithmetic, and it was his suggestion that each entry be dated in the new style as well as the old. He harboured, in the mild way of a peaceful man, a certain amusement at the Faulkner and Proctor rivalry. It struck him as a great litigation with no court, he said, and both parties too proud to settle. He once drafted, as a private joke, a mock deed of quitclaim ceding the Guest to the Proctors in perpetuity, and Edith kept it in the ledger's box until she died.
The fever took him in 1712. It began in the wet autumn, when half the town was down with it, and he had scarcely recovered from a chill when it returned. He died within the week, at forty-one, leaving his wife a widow of forty-five and his children, at fourteen and ten, without a father. The parish register records his burial at Blackburn. Alexander Sagar left no property to speak of, only a shelf of law books, a box of pens and a name that his son carried through the middle of another. The Slayerverse remembers him as the clerk who married into the Red Ledger without seeking a place in it, and who showed, by a careful and unremarkable life, that a family of hunters needs at least one person who is content to keep the books.
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