Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner

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

Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner was born in 1655 in Whalley, Lancashire, in the shadow of the ruined abbey and beneath the three carved crosses that stand in the churchyard, and he spent his life within a day's walk of them. Whalley in those years was a village that had outlived its monks by more than a century but had not stopped living off what they left: the great abbey precinct was a quarry and a rubble-yard, the Ribble ran below it, and the tanners, coopers and tallow-boilers who clustered along the lanes made a trade out of the slaughter and the cattle of the Ribble valley. It was a place of smells, and Denys became a man who knew every one of them. His father, Denys Shuttleworth, was a cooper who made tubs, churns and barrels in a shed behind the family cottage, and the boy was named for him. The cooper was a large, slow-spoken man with a burn scar on one forearm from the hoop-fire, and he taught his son the first principle of a working life, which was that a job was finished only when the vessel held. His mother, Quenild Chaloner, was a midwife, one of the women of the parish who were sent for at any hour and who walked out into the dark carrying a bag of clean linen and a good deal of authority. Denys grew up with the front door of the cottage opening at night to frightened men, and with his mother's voice on the stair saying that it was likely nothing but she would come. He said afterwards that he learned patience from one parent and steadiness from the other. The Faulkner name came to him through his sister rather than his father, a custom of the house that the family kept without comment. His sister Odelina Faulkner, born in 1654, was a year his senior, and she and Denys were raised as a pair, sharing the same bed and the same chores until she was old enough to go into service. The Red Ledger, the Faulkner tally of vampires taken by the Lancastrian side of the old feud, was known to both children from early on as the family's other book, a thing spoken of with respect at the supper table. Neither was called. Denys, though he never hunted, was told the outline of the matter while he was still a boy, and he grew into one of those relatives on whom the hunters relied without ever being asked to fight. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a chandler in the market town of Clitheroe, a few miles up the road, and it is with that trade that he became known. A chandler in the seventeenth century made and sold candles, and the work was hard and unglamorous. Tallow was rendered in great iron pans from the fat of cattle and sheep; wicks were twisted from cotton or from rushes and dipped by the dozen on rods; and the finished dips were stacked in racks to harden, their sour, greasy smell clinging to the maker's clothes and hair. Beeswax was a luxury for the church and the gentry. Denys learned to judge a wick by its thickness against the fat, to keep the pans below the point at which the tallow would smoke, and to pay off the butchers in kind when coin ran short. He completed his term at twenty-two and set up on his own account in a narrow shop in Whalley in 1677. The shop mattered to the family in a way that its modest takings did not show. The Red Ledger's hunters in the Ribble valley needed light in quantity, and light of the right kind. Denys made them long-burning dips of clean tallow that would not gutter in a wind, and, for the harder nights, a candle with a tin ring at the base that let a lantern-holder set it in a doorway. He kept a chest of them for the Faulkners and refused payment for any that went into a hunt. In his account book, which survives, a line of ruled marks at the foot of each page records candles that were never sold, and a later reader has taken them for a private tally of the family's nights. He was not a hunter, but he understood exactly what he was supplying. He never married. The family remembered him as a man who was not so much averse to women as absorbed elsewhere, and there is a story in the parish that he was once courted by a widow of Blackburn with a fat dowry and told her honestly that his shop was the only thing he loved enough to marry. He had no children and did not seem to grieve the lack, but he became the uncle of a large rotating brood, and the children of the neighbourhood learned to come to the back door of the chandlery on a cold morning for a heel of bread and a stub of candle. His mother Quenild lived with him in her last years, in a room over the shop, delivering half the babies of Whalley until her hands failed, and she died in 1692. His father followed in 1704, at the age of seventy-one. He lived through a stretch of national politics that reached Whalley only in fragments. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was known there by rumour, by a change in the prayers and by an increase in the price of candles as troops were raised. In 1715 the first Jacobite rising came much closer: the rebel column marched south through Lancashire that autumn, was met with divided opinions in the market towns, and was ground to a halt at Preston in November. Whalley and Clitheroe were full of the sound of it, and Denys, then sixty, recorded in his book that trade had been good, that he had sold four gross of dips to Hanoverian militia and two to a party of Jacobite gentlemen without comment on either, and that he trusted the Almighty to sort the quarrel. The Faulkners, cradle Lancastrians as they were, had no view of any crown but their own history. In old age he grew large and slow himself, resembling his father, and he took to sitting at the counter with a stub of pencil and the day's accounts, watching the street. The Red Ledger kept its keeper's copy of his candle-marks, and an uncle Denys shows up, in the margin, beside a number of entries in which a Faulkner hunter wrote that the light had held. In 1720 a wasting illness, which had been drawing his flesh off him for a year, killed him at the age of sixty-five. His sister Odelina had gone before him; the shop passed to a journeyman, and the chest of candles to a younger Faulkner. Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner is remembered in the Slayerverse as the chandler of Whalley, the man who kept the Ribble valley lit and never once asked what the light was for. The Faulkner house holds him up as a case of how the Red Ledger was sustained by trades as much as by tallies, and by the plain generosity of people who were never named in it.