Dionisia Tempest

Spouse of Sampson Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

There were two mills at Clitheroe in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the miller's daughter who became Dionisia Tempest was born to the second, the smaller wheel on the brook that fed down from the Pendle side, in the year 1542. Clitheroe was a market town with a Norman keep on a limestone knuckle above it, a borough charter older than anyone could remember, and a habit of looking down on the outlying villages while envying the wealth of Whalley and Preston. Dionisia grew up among the sounds of it: the stones grumbling in their case, the carts of oats and barley banging over the ford, the castle bell marking the hours, and the market cross where farmers shouted their prices on Saturday. A miller's girl learned a rough arithmetic before she learned anything else. Grain came in by the sack and left as meal, and between the two lay the toll, the measure, the moisture and the customer's suspicion. Dionisia was set to the toll-dish by the age of nine and was soon better at it than her brothers were, quick with the wooden measure, unflappable when a tenant farmer from Waddington accused the family of short weight. She could reckon the price of a load in her head. She never learned to write more than her name, but a Clitheroe grain factor of that generation said that he would rather deal with Dionisia's tally-sticks than with a clerk's ink. She had square shoulders and flour on her forearms to the elbow, and an unexpected laugh. The family's religion was the religion of whatever the statute demanded, and Dionisia inherited the caution. She was a child of six or seven when the altars were stripped in Edward's reign, and a girl in her teens when Mary brought back a Latin Mass that some in the church welcomed and many merely endured. By the time she was seventeen the Elizabethan settlement had come, and Clitheroe's vicar, once a Catholic priest, read from the new book without visible discomfort. Dionisia saw all this and drew her own conclusion, which she gave her children in later years: that the changes of monarch were weather, and a household should have a good roof. She met Sampson Faulkner at the ford, or so the family told it: he was leading a string of bullocks through the water and one of them balked, and the miller's daughter on the bank told him how to move it. Sampson, born in 1539, was the elder son of the Faulkner mill on the other side of town, a drover by choice who had left the wheel to his younger brother Humphrey, and a man whose calendar was set by the great cattle fairs of the north. They married in 1565, when Dionisia was twenty-three, and set up house in a stone cottage with a byre attached, near enough to both mills that either family could shout across a field. Sampson was often away for weeks, walking herds toward the south with a stick, a bedroll and a dog; Dionisia ran the household, kept the accounts, and gradually became the person to whom the other drovers' wives came for advice. Two sons followed. Toby Faulkner was born in 1568, a wiry, restless child who was climbing the castle wall before he was six, and Norman Faulkner in 1572, a broad, careful boy who took after the millers. She raised them in an ordinary Lancashire house of the time: oatmeal porridge in the morning, a stew of beans and bacon at night, a cheese cloth hung from the rafters, a prayer at the table that her husband mumbled through. She taught the boys that a family was an economy. Everything had a price, including trouble, and the sensible thing was to pay it early. What she knew of the Faulkner ledger came to her through marriage, and she came to it as she came to everything else, by counting. Sampson's brother Humphrey heard things at the mill, and Sampson himself heard things on the road; the tally of odd events, of stock drained at a certain drover's stance, of a traveller who refused hospitality until asked three times, accumulated in Dionisia's head as neatly as bushels. She never claimed to understand the Red Ledger's history, the Wars of the Roses feud with the Proctors of Yorkshire, or the mystery of the Guest at Towton. She simply understood that her husband's kin were engaged in something dangerous, that her son Toby had the temperament for it, and that a mother's task was to feed the hunter and keep the accounts straight. When Toby was called as a vampire slayer, in early manhood, Dionisia was the one who sold three bullocks to pay for his first proper gear, and she said nothing to anyone about where the money went. The Armada summer of 1588 was, for her, a matter of provisioning. She was forty-six, and the county was ordered to have beacons ready, men mustered and stores gathered. Dionisia baked bread for the musters and sent oatcakes with her sons to the hilltop fires. When the beacon at Pendle went up she stood in the doorway and counted her family, a habit she had never lost. Five years later, in 1593, Sampson died, aged fifty-four, and she was a widow at fifty-one, with a house, a small herd and two grown sons. She did not remarry. She took over the droving accounts, hired hands by the season, and ran the business with a firmness that made her the last person a cattle dealer wanted to argue with. Her own end was odd and quiet. In 1605, at the age of sixty-three, she attended a neighbour's granddaughter through a hard birth, as she had done for half the women of the lane, and took the childbed fever from the room; the parish register recorded the cause of death as childbed, which the clerk seemed to think was a compliment to her usefulness. She died that year and was buried at Clitheroe beside her husband. Toby outlived her by twenty-one years, and Norman by twenty-seven. The Faulkner ledger keepers did not give her a full entry, only a note in a later hand that "Dionisia kept the accounts of the house." The family's memory of her is stronger than the ledger's, however: she was the fixed point around which two sons, a brother-in-law and a dozen cousins revolved. In the long story of the Slayerverse she is a reminder that the Red Ledger rested on households like hers, in which sacks were weighed, cheese was salted and no vampire slayer ever left for the moor without a full belly.