Clemence Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The surviving samplers of Clemence Faulkner are unremarkable to a casual eye: neat rows of alphabet, a border of strawberries, a house with a chimney. It is only in a raking light that the stitching shows what she was, a woman who could set a hundred thousand identical stitches without a single slip and who understood that patience of that order was a form of courage. She was born in 1669 at Worcester in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, worked all her life as a seamstress in the meeting-house towns of the colony, never married, and died in 1721, aged fifty-two, after a fall from a horse. She belonged to the House of Faulkner and to the Red Ledger by descent from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, though her own gifts lay less with the stake than with the needle and the stubborn upkeep of a household that hunted. Her father was Maurice Hutchinson, a clerk, born in 1641, and a vampire slayer entered in the Red Ledger as The Sable Scythe, a name that came from the long, black, sweeping cut of his coat and from a hunting habit of cutting a vampire's retreat before striking. Her mother was Mercy Faulkner, also born in 1641, a spinster teacher, as the ledger's blunt phrase goes, meaning that she taught school and had in the eyes of the parish been a spinster until she was married late. In the Faulkner custom the surname passed through the women, so Clemence bore her mother's name and not her father's. She had one sister, Martha Faulkner, born three years before her in 1666, who became a slayer, so that the two girls grew up as opposites: Martha bold, direct and always at the door before the knock, Clemence careful, slow to speak and always the one who noticed the missing button. Worcester in the year of her birth was a raw place. The plantation lay in the interior of the colony, half a week's ride from Boston, and its settlers were few, its fields stony and its fences new. The peace with the Nipmuc people whose country it was had held for a generation, but it was brittle, and the settlement's garrison house was built as much for morning as for night. When King Philip's War broke out in 1675, the Hutchinson-Faulkner household fled with the other Worcester families. Clemence was six. She remembered the flight in fragments: her mother's arms, a cart with a broken wheel, a night in a strange barn, and the moment her sister, nine years old, took charge of the smaller children and forbade them to cry. The family took refuge at Concord, where Mercy taught a dame school in a rented room, and where Clemence first held a needle. The plantation was resettled in the 1680s and the family returned. By then Clemence was a girl of fifteen with a neat hand and a serious face, and the town needed seamstresses badly, since every household was making its own cloth and clothes and could use help with the finishing. She learned her trade by working alongside her mother's friends. Linen shifts, woollen petticoats, caps, aprons, waistcoats for the men and stays for the women: she could cut them all, and she could mend anything. She was a small, brown-haired, watchful woman with a slight stoop from bending over work, and by her twenties she had a steady custom among the families of Worcester and neighbouring towns, who paid her in coin when they had it and in eggs, cheese and firewood when they did not. Her father's work sat oddly in this Puritan household. Maurice Hutchinson was clerk of the town, keeping its books and recording its births, deaths and land grants in a fine copperplate, and after dark he went out with hawthorn stakes under his coat. Clemence learned of it as a child, as the Faulkner girls did, by the accident of a bloodied cuff and a mother who answered a question directly. She did not take the calling, and the ledger does not record that she wanted it. What she did instead was to make her father's work possible. She sewed the reinforced coats he wore, the loops on the inside of the sleeves that held the stakes, the pockets that did not rattle, the dark cloth that did not catch the moon. Martha, the slayer of the family, wore Clemence's tailoring all her life and refused, in the ledger's presence, to use any other seamstress. The witchcraft panic that gripped the colony in 1692 found Clemence at twenty-three. It reached Worcester at a slant, in the form of rumours and sermons and a nervous, prying atmosphere in which every seamstress who went from house to house risked becoming an object of suspicion. She was careful. She kept her opinions to herself, attended meeting every Sabbath, took no fee that could be called excessive, and made a point of never visiting a house alone. Her father, who knew better than anyone in the colony what was real, kept the family's papers under the floorboards. In the following year, 1693, Mercy Faulkner died, after a winter's illness, and the household was left a place of two women and an ageing clerk. Clemence took over her mother's small school in the mornings, teaching the youngest children their letters, and sewed through the afternoons. She never married. Suitors, in a town where unmarried women were few, were not lacking. A widowed farmer proposed to her twice and a minister's cousin once. Clemence turned them all away, and the family conjectured why: she was needed at home, she had a secret she could not share, and she had settled into a life whose satisfactions were internal. The Massachusetts of her time was a society in which a woman without a husband had, in law, a lesser standing, but she held her ground, kept her own accounts and, after her father's death in 1708, owned a modest house of her own. Martha lived nearby and hunted, and the two sisters were inseparable in the way of women who had been through a war together. The Faulkner and Proctor rivalry seemed a distant matter in Worcester. Clemence knew the Proctors chiefly as the correspondents to whom her father sent his tallies, and as the source of one memorable Proctor cousin who visited the colony and admired her needlework, which she took as a compliment on the ledger's behalf. She kept a small book of her own, in which she recorded not kills but repairs: the number of coats she had reinforced, the sleeves she had lined, the pockets she had added, and the slayers who had come home wearing them. It was her ledger, and it ran, when she died, to some four hundred entries. In the autumn of 1721 she was riding home from a fitting in a neighbouring town when her horse, startled by a dog on a wet road, threw her against a stone wall. She lived a few days. Clemence Faulkner was fifty-two years old. She left no husband and no children, and her house passed to her sister's care. The Slayerverse remembers her as the seamstress who sewed the Red Ledger's hunters into their armour of wool and thread, and whose small book of repairs is still shown to visitors as proof that a house's strength lies as much in what holds it together as in what it strikes.