Edith Tattersall Faulkner was born in 1667 in Blackburn, Lancashire, in a house that smelled of ale, leather and wet wool, and she spent the whole of a long life within a day's walk of the parish church where she was christened. 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, but the family's work touched her chiefly as a listener, a bookkeeper of other people's fears and, in the end, a keeper of the family's memory. The Faulkner records call her a tavern keeper's daughter, and the description is exact: the Faulkners of her generation kept their ledger in the back room of a public house, and Edith grew up at its door.
Her father, George Faulkner, was a saddler by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, known in the ledger by the alias The True Seal. He worked his leather in a shop beside the market cross, and when a lease fell vacant he took on a tavern nearby as well, a low, smoky place called the Three Bridles that served the drovers, carriers and cloth dealers who came through Blackburn on market days. Her mother, Alice Tattersall, was a housekeeper by training, a woman who had run other people's kitchens before she ran her own, and she managed the tavern's cellars, its accounts and its temper with the same brisk economy. Edith had one sister, Agatha Tattersall Faulkner, born in 1665, two years her senior, and the two girls were raised in the noise of the taproom, learning to pour, to count change, and to tell from the tone of a man's laughter whether he wanted another quart or an argument.
Blackburn in those years was a market town on the edge of the hand-loom country. Weavers worked in the cottages on the hillsides, delivering their pieces of grey cloth to the merchants below, and the town's trade in linen and cotton mixtures was already growing. Rain came off the moors for most of the year. The Civil War was a memory belonging to the parents of the town, and the Restoration had brought back the bishops and the Prayer Book, leaving the older Presbyterian families sullen and watchful. A tavern keeper's daughter learned politics early, and Edith learned to hold her tongue about it. She learned, too, the smaller economies of a household living close to the margin: candles counted, bread baked in the shared oven, and the coin from a good market day set aside against the leaner winter.
Her childhood ended in stages. Alice Tattersall died in 1675, when Edith was eight, and the household passed for a time into the hands of neighbours and a hired woman. George kept the shop and the tavern going, and he taught his younger daughter what he could. Edith's early education was a tavern education: figures, first, since he wanted her to keep the reckoning; then letters, because the ledger was written and copied by hand; and then, in the evenings after the last customer had gone, the family's stories, told across the cold hearth in a low voice. She learned what the Red Ledger was and what the Guest meant to the Faulkners, and she learned that the Proctors of York had been blamed for the escape at Towton since before anyone alive could say why. Her father entered his tallies in the ledger with a saddler's steady hand, and she was allowed to sand the ink. She never took the calling, and it seems she never expected to.
George Faulkner died in 1685, when Edith was eighteen, and the Three Bridles was let to a new tenant. Edith and Agatha were both suddenly women with their own way to make. Edith took work at the tavern's new keeper, and later at other houses of entertainment along the road, keeping accounts and managing the serving girls. She was a small, straight woman with a level gaze and a habit of tilting her head when she listened, which unsettled the customers who assumed she was not listening at all. The reputation she earned in those years was for accuracy. She could recite the score on any slate, and she never forgot who owed what to whom, a gift that mattered when the ledger later passed through her hands.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 reached Blackburn as rumour and then as proclamation: King James gone, William and Mary declared, the old fear of a Catholic monarch lifted from the Protestant households and settling instead on the Jacobite gentry of the county. Edith was twenty-one. The tavern talk that winter was of muskets taken down from walls and of which gentleman had been seen riding at night. She noticed how the men of the town divided, and she carried away from it a lifelong caution about loyalties spoken aloud. When the first Jacobite rising came in 1715, she was forty-eight and a widow, and she watched it from the window of a house in Blackburn while the Lancashire Jacobites marched to Preston and were beaten there by government troops in November. She said afterward that she had not slept properly for a week and that the Faulkners were fortunate to have no man of military age still in the family.
In 1697 she married Alexander Sagar, a clerk born in Blackburn in 1671, four years younger than she. He had come to the tavern first as a customer, one of the young men who took their bread and small beer at the same table each noon, copying deeds for an attorney in the next street. He was quiet, precise and slightly stooped, with ink on his cuffs, and he courted her by asking about the ledger's arithmetic and, later, offering to check it. The marriage was a plain, companionable one, celebrated in the parish church with the guests crowded into a rented room afterward. The couple took rooms near the market and later a small house, and Alexander's clerk's wage, supplemented by Edith's accounts work, kept them modestly and steadily above want.
Their two children arrived in the first years. George Faulkner Sagar was born in 1698, named for his grandfather and carrying the Faulkner name in the middle, which family custom favoured; Rebecca Faulkner was born in 1702 and bore the name outright, another instance of the surname passing through the women of the house. Edith raised both to read and reckon, and she told them, as her father had told her, the substance of the Red Ledger in the evenings, though neither became a hunter. George Faulkner Sagar grew into a quiet young man who followed his father into clerking and died in 1739, at forty-one, a year before his mother. Rebecca outlived them all, dying in 1772 at the age of seventy, and it was she who preserved what Edith had told her.
Alexander Sagar died of a fever in 1712, at forty-one, and Edith was left a widow of forty-five with two children in their teens. She did not remarry. She kept the household going by taking in accounts, copying, and eventually keeping the books for a small cloth merchant, and she copied out, in a careful, upright hand, the Faulkner entries that came to her from cousins across the county, folding the pages into a box under her bed. The Faulkner and Proctor rivalry reached her only at that distance, in the form of gossip: a Proctor cousin in York was said to have boasted of a tally, and a Lancashire hunter had answered it with one of his own. She kept the reckoning without joining the quarrel.
Edith Tattersall Faulkner died in 1740, aged seventy-three, of a wasting illness that took most of a year. She was buried at Blackburn beside the husband whose name she had carried for fifteen years and long outlived. The Slayerverse remembers her as one of the quiet keepers of the Red Ledger, a woman who never drew a stake against a vampire yet who ensured, through her daughter Rebecca, that the tallies of her father and her cousins survived intact into the next century.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
