Elizabeth Faulkner

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

Elizabeth Faulkner was born in 1766 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a crowded fishing port north of Boston where the houses stood shoulder to shoulder on granite ledges and every front door opened within earshot of the harbour. She was a herbalist by trade and a Faulkner by family custom, the younger daughter of a carpenter and a milliner who between them kept a household that smelled of cut pine, steamed straw and salt wind. She never married and left no children, yet the Faulkner ledger keepers of later generations listed her among the people without whom the Red Ledger would have run short of ink, for she was the woman the family's hunters went to when a wound would not close. Her father, Amos Whittier, was born in 1738 and died in 1783. He was a carpenter who framed the gambrel-roofed houses of the town and mended the wharves and fish flakes after every gale, and he carried a rule, a square and a plumb line in a leather roll that Elizabeth later kept on a shelf beside her drying racks. Her mother, Betsey Whittier Faulkner, was born in 1739 and lived until 1799. By day she trimmed bonnets and sold ribbon from the front room of the Whittier house. By night, according to the ledger, she was the vampire slayer known as The Silent Tally, a woman who took her name from the habit of writing every entry in the Red Ledger without a word spoken aloud, so that not even the neighbours on the other side of a thin wall could say what she did after dark. Marblehead was a town where everybody knew everybody's business, and the Faulkner women had learned that the best secrecy was to be dull in daylight. Elizabeth grew up beside an older sister, Betsey Faulkner Whittier, born in 1763, who was also called to the work. The sisters shared a bed under the eaves until Betsey was sent to learn the hunter's craft from their mother, and Elizabeth, who had no calling of her own, was set to the stillroom instead. Nothing about that division was treated as a slight. A Faulkner hunter who came home bruised needed a poultice as surely as she needed a pistol, and the family had learned during the long Lancashire years, and then in the harder first decades in Massachusetts, that the Lancastrian side of the Wars of the Roses rivalry was won as much by those who kept hunters alive as by those who took vampires. Elizabeth took the lesson seriously and made a craft of it. She learned plants the way other girls learned sums. The marsh edges and the salt meadows around Marblehead gave her yarrow for bleeding, comfrey for bruises, plantain for stings, and the bitter tansy and wormwood that every household kept against fevers. The pastures inland supplied boneset and elder, and a widow in Salem who had been a midwife sold her dried foxglove in small twists of paper with the warning that the dose was the difference between medicine and funeral. Elizabeth wrote everything down in a stitched notebook, plant by plant, with the date, the ailment and the outcome, and when she was a grown woman that notebook was better than the printed physic books the town doctor owned. She distrusted mercury and bleeding, which the physicians loved, and preferred a clean dressing, boiled water and patience. The Revolution shaped her youth. She was nine when the news from Lexington came down the coast road, and Marblehead's regiment of fishermen, Colonel Glover's men, marched out of the town and later rowed Washington's army across the East River by night. Elizabeth watched the militia muster on the common with their fowling pieces and pitchforks, and she watched the harbour empty of boats when the British blockade came in. Food grew scarce and prices rose; the paper money lost its value month by month; smallpox moved through the town in the lean years and left pitted faces in its wake. Her father died in 1783, just as the war was ending, and the family's carpentry money went with him. Elizabeth, then seventeen, took in sewing and sold her remedies door to door to keep her mother and sister fed, and it was in those months that she first saw what a steady pair of hands and a box of dried leaves could do for a neighbour who could not pay a physician. The Faulkners' hunting in those years was quiet and irregular. The Red Ledger records a handful of vampires taken in the coastal towns during the war, most of them men who had come ashore from ships that were not quite what their papers claimed. Her mother's entries are brief and never boastful, and her sister's are more detailed. In nearly every one of them there is a line about a wound dressed or a fever broken at the Whittier kitchen table, and more often than not the dressing was Elizabeth's. She grew used to being woken at the small hours by a knock, to a hunter holding a torn arm in a cloth, and to a quiet word about how it had happened. She never asked more than she needed to know, and the family trusted her for that. She never married, and the reason the family gave was simple: she was too useful and too particular. Two or three men of the town made their intentions plain over the years, among them a cooper and a schoolmaster, and she declined all of them with courtesy. She preferred her own small house near Old Burial Hill, the drying herbs hung in bundles from the rafters, the cat on the sill and the tin of dried peppermint she gave to children. She kept a school of sorts in her kitchen on Saturday mornings, teaching the girls of the neighbourhood to recognise a dozen plants by sight and smell, and more than one of those girls grew up to keep a still room of her own. Her nieces and nephews in the wider Faulkner connection regarded her as the aunt to write to when a question of physic arose, and her letters, short and exact, travelled to cousins in Springfield, Salem and, later, across the mountains. Her mother died in 1799, and Elizabeth took over the family's small pharmacy entirely. The War of 1812 came near the end of her life, and with it the return of the blockade, the idle ships and the shortage of everything. She worked through that time as she had worked through the last war, making salves out of tallow and beeswax, packing poultices and sending bundles of dried herbs to the privateers' surgeons in the harbour. She was forty-six when she died in 1812 in an accident on the high ground above the town, where she had gone gathering herbs on a wet autumn morning and slipped on the wet rock. The family found her basket upright at the foot of the slope, still full of late yarrow. The Red Ledger has no entry for that day, because nothing in it was a hunt, but the family's private book of remembrance records her name with the single word Steadfast. Elizabeth Faulkner is remembered as the herbalist of Marblehead, the unmarried Faulkner aunt whose stillroom notebook was copied by hand and handed down for more than a century. The notebook reached Kentucky with her cousins when the Faulkner line moved west in the 1770s and 1780s, and later New Orleans, where a great-niece rewrote half of it in French and added the herbs of the bayou. Modern readers of the Faulkner archive treat her as the family's proof that the rivalry with the Proctors of the White Ledger was never carried on only by those who carried silver. Within the Slayerverse she stands as a reminder that a long war of tallies and reputations is also a war of bandages, kitchens and patient, unglamorous care.