Avice Thwaites came into the world in 1586 in Blackburn, Lancashire, one year after her sister Margery, and she grew into the sort of woman whose door was knocked upon at all hours. Blackburn was a busy market town on the river Darwen, a place of woollen and linen weaving, of tanning and of a great Saturday market where the hundred's farmers sold oats, cheese and hides. She belonged to the House of Faulkner, the Lancastrian keepers of the Red Ledger, through a line that ran back to the marriage of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor at York in January 1486. But she was first and last a herbalist, and it was in that capacity that her neighbours knew her and her family valued her.
Her father, Hugh Thwaites, born in 1557, was a tavern keeper, whose house on the Lancashire road was loud, warm and full of talk. Her mother, Martha Greenhalgh, born in 1562, was a herbalist of the country kind, whose knowledge came from her own mother and from a collection of recipes copied into a stitched book. The family had moved between Bolton and Blackburn as the tavern's lease and its trade required, and Avice was born on the Blackburn side of that arrangement, while her sister Margery, a weaver, had been born in Bolton the year before. The two girls shared their earliest years, but they drifted into different work. Margery took to the loom. Avice took to her mother's back room, where bundles of dried plants hung from the beams and where she was allowed, from about the age of six, to strip leaves from stalks and to keep the labels straight.
The craft she learned was not mystical. It was a practical body of remedies, tested through generations of trial and error and drawing on the gardens and hedgerows of the Lancashire plain. Yarrow staunched wounds; elder flowers brought down a fever; comfrey knit bones; feverfew eased the head; wormwood dosed the gut. Martha had her still-room recipes for ointments made with hog's lard and beeswax and for syrups boiled with honey, and Avice learned not only what to pick but when: which plants at which phase of the moon was a matter of custom, though Martha, who was a shrewd woman, said the real reason was the weather. Avice absorbed all this and added to it by observing, and by the time she was in her mid-teens she could diagnose a bad chest from the sound of a cough on the stairs. She was small, sharp-featured and brisk, with strong forearms from grinding roots in a mortar, and her hands were permanently stained green and brown.
Her father died in 1603, when she was seventeen, and Blackburn's leases and the tavern passed away from the family. Avice and her mother took rooms in a house near the church, and Martha sold remedies at the market while her daughter walked the country lanes with a basket, gathering. A young woman with a basket and a knowledge of plants was a familiar sight and a slightly suspect one, as the century's belief in witchcraft made herbalists cautious about how much they said. Avice learned early to be plain-spoken and to have a Christian phrase ready, and to write nothing down that might be read wrongly. In 1610, at twenty-four, she married Clement Widdop, a saddler born in 1589. He was three years younger, an exact, unadventurous craftsman who worked leather in a shop beside the market cross and made harness for half the farmers of the district. Clement's temper was as even as his stitching, and it was he who built her the rack of drying shelves that lined the wall of their house.
Two daughters followed. Helen Widdop was born in 1611, and Heloise Faulkner in 1613, the latter carrying the Faulkner name in accordance with the family custom of passing the surname through daughters. Neither girl became a slayer, but both grew up inside the household's rhythms: in early summer the whole family gathered meadowsweet and elder; in autumn they gathered roots; in winter they boiled down syrups on the hearth and stoppered them into small stone jars. Avice was a careful mother who taught her daughters to read from an English primer and to recognise the plants by touch as well as sight, and who scolded them equally for gossip and for wasted honey. Helen inherited her father's neatness and Heloise her mother's curiosity, and Avice's letters to Margery mention the two of them chiefly as competitors over the last of the rosemary.
Her real usefulness to the Red Ledger began at the kitchen table. Slayers are ordinary mortals, and they are hurt in ordinary ways: torn muscle, broken ribs, deep cuts from claws and blades, and the shock and fever of a bad night. The Faulkner hunters of Lancashire knew that Avice could treat them without asking too many questions, and gradually she became the family's unofficial physician. Her nephew Abraham and niece Mary, Margery's children, came to her more than once with wounds that had to be dressed in a hurry, and in Avice's back room they were washed, salved, bound and fed with broth. She took nothing for it but a share of whatever game or fish they brought. She kept, on a sewn sheet under the floor, a list of what she had used and what had worked, and this small pharmacopoeia was said to be more reliable than the printed herbals of the time.
Her sister Margery lived not far away, in the Bolton hills, and the two women wrote and visited whenever the roads allowed. Their bond was fed by their common training and by the shared memory of the tavern. Together they buried their mother in 1616, and it was to Avice that Martha's stitched recipe book passed. Together too they lived through the plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, and Avice was one of those who went into infected houses when others would not, wrapped in a vinegar-soaked cloth and armed with rue and juniper smoke, and she lost neighbours and patients by the dozen. In 1625 Margery lost Edward Stansfield to the plague, and Avice made the journey over the moor to sit with her sister for a week. Clement Widdop died in 1644, in the middle of the civil wars, when Blackburn was pulled between Royalist and Parliamentary garrisons and the saddler's trade collapsed to almost nothing.
Avice was a widow for twelve years and continued her work as long as her feet would carry her. The last remedy she made was, characteristically, for someone else. In 1656, aged seventy, she caught the sickness that the older people in Lancashire still called the sweating sickness, a fever of drenching sweat and sudden collapse, and she died of it that year. Her sister Margery had died five years earlier, and Avice's daughters Helen, who lived until 1662, and Heloise, who lived until 1665, inherited her book and her shelves. Among Faulkner descendants and the chroniclers of the Slayerverse, Avice Thwaites is remembered as the healer who kept the family's fighters alive, the woman who knew that a slayer's craft was worth nothing if the slayer could not walk out of the dark, and the one whose green-stained hands closed more wounds than any blade in the Red Ledger opened.
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