Gunnora Faulkner

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

Gunnora Faulkner grew up in the shadow of Pendle Hill, in the years when that name meant witches to half of England, and she learned early that what a house said about itself and what it did after dark were not always the same thing. She was born in 1619 at Read, a hamlet of stone farmhouses beneath the hill in Lancashire, the third daughter of Nicholas Faulkner and Gunnora Hoyle, and she was named for her mother. Her father was the vampire slayer known to the Red Ledger as the Pendle Watcher, but by the time she was old enough to understand what that meant, he had been dead for twelve years. The trial of the Pendle witches had taken place in 1612, seven years before her birth, and the country around Read had not yet stopped talking about it. Ten people had been hanged at Lancaster, and the hill villages had kept their neighbours under a suspicious eye ever since. Nicholas Faulkner, born in 1583, a yeoman's son with a taste for other people's secrets, had made a study of the trial's aftermath and concluded that a good deal of what the magistrates had called witchcraft was, in truth, a smokescreen: something else had been feeding in the hollows of the hill and the frightened villagers had turned on one another rather than name it. His watching of the ground round Pendle, from a shepherd's hut on the flank and from a window in the family farmhouse, earned him his alias and the family a reputation for being strange. He died in 1631 when Gunnora was twelve, and the details of his death were kept from her until she was old enough to be told. Her mother Gunnora Hoyle, born in 1588, was a seamstress who kept the family fed with plain sewing after her husband's death. She taught her daughters the needle and the household arts, and Gunnora, who inherited her mother's Christian name and her steady hands, absorbed both. There were four other children in the house: Millicent, born in 1612, Anne, born in 1615, and a younger brother, Ivo, born in 1621, whose long life would run beside hers. The family lived in a low farmhouse with a flagged floor and a spinning wheel in the corner, and ate oatcake, bacon, curds and the occasional trout from the Calder. The wind off the moor rattled the windows on winter nights, and in the loft the children slept three to a bed under a heap of coats. She was not called and was never a hunter. What she was, from about her teens, was the person the family relied on to keep the house. She was solid and unhurried, with broad shoulders and a slow smile, and an unexpected talent for making a company of tired men and women feel that everything was under control. When her mother died in 1643, worn out by the war years, Gunnora had already been running the household for some time, and it was natural that she should keep the post. She became, in the language of the time, a housekeeper: not a servant but the woman at the centre of a working farmhouse and an extended family, who held the keys, the accounts and the family's confidence. The civil wars made the role harder. Lancashire was a divided county, with the Royalist gentry of the Ribble and the Parliamentarian cloth towns eyeing each other across the hills, and troops of both sides passed through Read. In 1644 the fighting around Whalley left the district full of wounded and of deserters, and Gunnora had a barn full of strangers to feed. She dressed wounds with linen and honey, sat up with the dying, and buried a man in the corner of the orchard when the parson refused. She kept the Red Ledger's household running throughout, storing the salt and the hawthorn, and hiding the book itself in a hollow beneath the hearthstone when soldiers were quartered in the house. She married Robert Slater in 1646. He was born in 1624, a clerk of the sort who copied deeds and wrote wills for the farmers of the district, a neat, dry, ink-stained man five years her junior, and he had come to Read to draw up the settlement of a neighbour's estate and stayed to take dinner. The Faulkners were doubtful at first, the more so because Robert was not of the blood, but he showed himself capable of writing the ledger's fair copies in a beautiful hand, and he kept his counsel. The pair set up house in the Faulkner farmhouse, with Gunnora's brother Ivo living close by. Two sons followed. Kit Faulkner was born in 1647 and took his mother's name, as the family's custom permitted, and Nicholas Slater was born in 1649, named for the grandfather he never knew and given his father's surname. The brothers grew up in a household where the ledger was a familiar object and the cellar had a curious number of locks. Gunnora raised them with firmness and humour, taught them their letters herself, and made sure they knew the names of every cousin and every quarrel. Neither became a slayer, but Kit, in particular, spent his life at the edges of the family's work and lived to the age of seventy-six, dying in 1723, while Nicholas died in 1720. The great plague year of 1665 took some of her neighbours, though it did not reach her house. In the aftermath she helped organise the burial of the dead in the churchyard and the burning of infected bedding, and kept a list of the living for the parish, which she later copied into the back of the household book. Her husband Robert continued to work as a clerk through the Restoration, and the couple lived quietly in a comfortable middle age, with visits from nieces and nephews and long letters from cousins in Yorkshire who wrote in a stiff, formal courtesy that never quite concealed the rivalry. She died in 1675 of childbed, at the age of fifty-six. The family remembered it as a grief and a puzzle. She had gone to attend a neighbour's lying-in, as she had done for a lifetime of births, and had brought the childbed fever home with her. It was quick and cruel, and within the week she was dead. Robert, who lived on until 1690, put up a slate stone in the churchyard at Read and never again wrote anything in a hand as neat as the one that recorded the date. In the Slayerverse Gunnora Faulkner is recalled as the housekeeper who held a hunting family together across two decades of war and plague. The Red Ledger's household book, in which she recorded every meal, every candle and every bed for the cousins who passed through, still exists, and historians of the family regard it as a rare and unvarnished portrait of what it took to keep a hunting house alive.