Alice Tattersall came into the world in 1636 in Garstang, Lancashire, a market town on the Wyre where the Lancaster road crossed the river and where, every Thursday, drovers and dealers filled the main street with sheep, cheese and argument. The name Tattersall is an old one in the county, and the family papers place her among the small tenant farmers and tradesmen of the district, people with a bit of land and a good deal of debt, who knew their neighbours' affairs down to the last shilling. Neither her father nor her mother is named in the Faulkner ledgers, which is why the biography of Alice must begin with what she did, not with whom she came from. What survives is her reputation: a girl who could keep anything in order, from a larder to a quarrel.
The wars were her early years. She was a child of six when the first battles were fought in the north-west and a girl of fifteen when the last Royalist hopes were broken, and Garstang, on the main road, saw its share of soldiers. There were quartering charges, requisitions of hay and a long, uneasy season when the local gentry could not agree on whom to obey. Alice learned early to keep the bread in a chest with a lock and to hide the ale where a trooper would not think to look. It was in those years, the story goes, that she first showed the gift that would define her life: a talent for managing a household under pressure, for knowing what was in the storeroom and what would be needed next month. She went into service at fourteen in a gentleman's house on the Preston road, where an old housekeeper took her under her wing and taught her the arts of the still room, the linen press and the account book.
By the middle 1650s she was a housekeeper herself, first in a farmhouse and then in a larger house in Bolton, where she kept the keys, ordered the provisions, directed the maids and dealt with butchers who tried to cheat her. She had a small square hand for accounts, a memory for prices, and a way of standing with her hands folded that made a tradesman check his weights. She was tall and plain, with a scar on her chin from a childhood fall and a way of laughing that surprised people. In Bolton she came to know a saddler named George Faulkner, a young man of her own age who worked in a shop near the market cross, and who came to the great house to deliver harness and repair a side-saddle. They exchanged remarks about leather and about the state of the roads, and by the end of the season he had found reasons to call at the kitchen door.
They were married in 1664. George was twenty-seven and Alice twenty-eight, both a little older than was usual, and the wedding was held at the parish church of Bolton with a supper for the neighbours. Alice was not, in the family's vocabulary, a person of the calling; she was not a slayer, and she had no craft. But George was, and he told her the truth before the wedding, in the awkward way of a man who has decided that honesty is better than a bad surprise. He took her to the back room of the saddlery and showed her the pistol, the hawthorn stakes and the Faulkner ledger, and he explained what he did on the nights he did not come home. Alice listened to the end, asked three sensible questions about the cost of powder and where the stakes were seasoned, and then said that she supposed the house would need better locks. The story is told with affection in the family, and it is credited with setting the tone of the marriage.
Their household ran on her management. She kept the accounts for the shop, ordered the leather and the thread, managed the apprentice and dealt with the customers, so that George was free to ride out when he was called. She also managed the other business of the house: the drying of hawthorn cuttings in the attic, the ordering of powder under the cover of ordinary purchases, the small lie told to the neighbour who asked where the master was. When George returned at dawn with mud on his boots and a cut on his hand, she would have hot water and a clean cloth ready and would not ask a question until he had eaten. She had two daughters, Agatha Tattersall Faulkner, born in 1665, and Edith Tattersall Faulkner, born in 1667, and she raised them to be capable and watchful, teaching them their letters, their prayers and the household arts, and telling them the truth about the house when they were old enough to keep it.
The great plague year of 1665 fell in the first months of Agatha's life. Bolton, like much of Lancashire, was touched at the edges, and the market was closed for a season. Alice, with an infant at her breast, kept the shop doors shut, bought her flour from a carter who left it at the gate, and burned juniper and vinegar in the rooms. The family came through unharmed, and Alice used to say afterwards that the plague year had taught her more about housekeeping than any book: how to stretch a sack of oats, how to make a household smell of nothing but soap, and how to hold your nerve when a neighbour's house was marked with a cross. She and George kept their accounts through it with a steadiness that the family long remembered.
Her death came in 1675, when she was thirty-nine. She had gone out onto the fells above Bolton, for reasons the family accounts describe only as errands of the house, perhaps to gather herbs or to carry word to a cousin, and there was an accident on the moor in bad weather. She did not return. George, who had spent a career walking those hills at night, went out with lanterns and found her at first light. She died of an accident on the fells, aged thirty-nine, and it is said that George never entirely recovered from the fact that a woman who had faced everything else in his life without flinching had been taken by a wet slope and a loose stone. Agatha was ten and Edith eight, and they were raised afterwards by their father and by the aunt who came from the family, and the housekeeper's keys passed to the elder girl.
Alice is remembered in the Red Ledger as one of the great unarmed allies of the Faulkners, a woman who never took a wound and never took a tally, and who nonetheless made possible every entry her husband wrote. The keys she wore at her belt were kept by her daughters and, it is said, by their descendants. Among the families of the Slayerverse she is the model of the person who holds a house together so that others can go out of it.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
