Grace Pickering was born in 1483 at Haslingden in the hill country of Lancashire, in the same year that Edward IV died and the kingdom began to lean toward the disaster that would end at Bosworth, though nobody in the moorland weaving households of Rossendale would have seen it in those terms. To them the year meant a wet summer, a poor barley crop, and a cloth trade that was slow. Her people were weavers, and her earliest memory was of the sound of the loom: the beat of the batten, the rattle of the heddles, the long rasp of the shuttle. Haslingden's houses were low and stone-built, many of them with a weaving shed on the ground floor and the family living above, and the clack of looms could be heard along the whole of the lane.
The weaver's trade of that era was a domestic one. Wool from the moor sheep was washed, carded and spun by the women and children of a household, then woven by the men, or by the women when the men were needed at the plough, on broad looms that took two people to work. The cloth was carried to the fulling mill, thickened with fuller's earth and water, stretched on tenter frames in the fields and taken to market. It was rough kersey and coarse woollen, made for the working people of the north and for export through Chester, and it paid poorly. A weaving household lived close to the edge of want and depended on its neighbours, on the price of wool and on the weather. Grace grew up with these truths. She learned to weave at twelve and was reckoned, by fifteen, a better hand at the loom than her father.
She was a broad-shouldered, red-cheeked young woman with a steady eye, a strong voice for singing and a dislike of being told what could not be done. She liked the hills. On her free days she walked the moor tops with a basket, gathering bilberries and fleece caught on the thorn, and she knew the paths well enough to walk them in the dark. It was a habit that the parish considered odd in a girl, and one that her family tolerated. The land around Haslingden was a country of stone walls and boggy hollows, and its treacherous ground had killed a good many careless walkers. Grace was not careless. She was thought sure-footed to a fault, and it was a fact of her later life that the fells, which she trusted, finally took her.
She met Edmund Faulkner through the wool trade. He was the elder son of the Tudor marriage, raised a Faulkner on the Lancashire lands, the boy whose parents, Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, had joined the two houses at York in the January of 1486, and he had grown up with the bearing of a man who is aware of being watched from both sides. He was five years younger than she was, a tall, dark, self-contained young man who came to Haslingden to buy cloth for the family. Edmund was a slayer, and she did not know that. She saw only a courteous person who examined her work with unusual attention and asked a good many questions about the roads across the moor. They were married in 1510, in the parish church, with her father's loom loaned to the young couple as part of the settlement.
The Faulkner household that she entered was a curious one, and it took her some time to see its shape. Edmund kept the Red Ledger's business in a separate room, went out at odd hours, and returned with his boots wet and his manner distant, and there were strangers who came to the door and would not give their names. Grace was not a stupid woman. She held her tongue for two years, and at the end of the second she put a question to him across the supper table, in front of the dog, that he could not evade. He told her the truth. He told her about Hugh and Walter and the year 1455, about Towton and the vampire the ledgers call the Guest, about the rivalry with the Proctors, and about the work that he did. She sat quite still, and then asked whether she was to be told when he was going out. He said that she was. She said that would do.
She never became a slayer, and she never wanted to. What she did was to keep the household from being noticed. A house whose master goes out at night and returns before dawn, whose door is visited by strangers, whose cellar contains iron-tipped stakes and a chest of ledgers, is a house that the neighbours will talk about, and Grace made sure they talked about her instead. She wove in the front room with the door open, sold cloth from the step, gossiped at the well and gave the impression of a wife whose husband was a dealer in wool and often away. Her looms became the household's cover and its living. She was also the one who sat up: she kept the fire going, the bandages ready, the lamp lit, and the accounts of who had come and gone.
Their children were born in the first decade. Harry Faulkner arrived in 1511, the year after the wedding, a solid and cheerful boy who was to grow up to be a wool merchant. Maurice Faulkner followed in 1518, and Margery Faulkner in 1519, the youngest, a bright-eyed girl who was said to have inherited her mother's voice. None of the three became a slayer. In between came the Flodden campaign of 1513, which drew men from every northern parish and left the villages short-handed. Edmund stayed at home, since the ledger did not permit its keepers to march to the king's wars, and Grace, with a baby on her hip, wove for the levy's wives.
In the autumn of 1524 she went up on the fells alone, as she had done since girlhood, to look for a stray ewe that had got into the bracken, and she did not come home. She was found the next morning at the foot of a rocky scar, where a slab of wet turf had given way beneath her. She was forty-one. It was, the parish said, an accident on the fells, the kind of accident the moorland took every few years, and the Faulkner family accepted the verdict, although Edmund walked the ground for a week afterwards with a lamp and a stake and found nothing to contradict it. He buried her at Haslingden. He lived another seventeen years and died in 1541, a widower, and their younger son Maurice was to marry Meg Thorne in 1537 and carry the Thorne blood into the Faulkner house.
In the family's memory, Grace was the weaver who kept the Red Ledger's house respectable, a person who never carried a stake and who was, nevertheless, indispensable. Her loom, it was said, was still in use a century later. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as one of the ones who stood in the doorway and held the light.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
