Harry Rishton

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

Harry Rishton was born in 1539 at Garstang, Lancashire, on the low, wet ground where the river Wyre slides toward the Fylde and the last of the upland pasture gives out. His people were fell folk of the humblest sort, tenants at will who kept a few dozen ewes on rented grazing and owed labour, small rents and a share of every fleece to whoever held the land that year. The year of his birth was a bad one to be a poor man in the north. The great abbeys of Lancashire were being dissolved, their granges sold off to gentlemen and speculators, and the shepherds who had grazed monastic pasture for generations found their leases rewritten by strangers in London. Harry grew up hearing men argue in the alehouse about who now owned the hill, and the answer changed so often that he learned early to trust the sheep and the weather more than any parchment. The work shaped him more than any schooling. He never learned his letters beyond the cross he made in the parish book, but he could count a flock by sight, judge a ewe's age by her teeth, and read the sky over Bleasdale well enough to know a week ahead when the snow would come down. A shepherd's year in that country ran from lambing in the raw weeks of March, through the clipping in June and the salving of the fleeces with tar and butter, to the autumn gathering when every sheep was walked down off the moor by dog and stick. He kept a small, rough-coated dog named for nothing anyone remembered, and he was known for the way he could work it without raising his voice. Neighbours described him as slow to speak and slower to anger, a tall, stooped man with big cracked hands who smelled permanently of lanolin and peat smoke. He met Nesta Faulkner at a clipping, where the carders of the district came to buy and sort the new wool, and it was said in the family that she out-argued him over the price of a fleece and married him because of it. They wed in 1562, when Harry was twenty-three and Nesta nineteen, in the church at Whalley under the shadow of the ruined abbey. The match carried a small oddity that the family took for granted: Nesta came of Faulkner stock, and Faulkners had a custom of letting the name travel through daughters, so that the children of the marriage did not all bear the shepherd's surname. Harry, who owned no name worth guarding and no land to leave, raised no objection. He took the arrangement as one more thing the women of that house understood better than he did. Their first daughter, Tiffany Faulkner, was born in 1564 and carried her mother's name by custom, and their second, Blanche Rishton, arrived in 1566 and took her father's. Harry loved both without making a display of it. The household lived in a low, stone-walled cottage with a turf-and-slate roof, one room below and a loft above, where the family ate oat bread, curds and a little salted mutton, and where the wool that Nesta carded was stacked against the walls to keep the draughts out. In winter the ewes came down into the croft and their breath steamed the shutters. Harry taught the girls to walk the wall lines, to read the ground for the tracks of fox and stray dog, and to keep still at night on the fell, a lesson in patience that would matter a great deal to his younger daughter. The years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown passed over Lancashire like weather over the moor. Harry had been born into the old faith, was a child when the priests were turned out and the rood screen torn down, and reached manhood under a Protestant Prayer Book that half the parish still followed with lowered eyes. In 1569 the northern earls rose against Elizabeth, and the news ran up the dales in a matter of days. Harry was thirty then, and the recruiting parties looked hard at every able man in the district. He kept his head down and his flock high on the hill and let the trouble go by; a shepherd, he told his wife, was of no use to any army that expected to eat mutton in spring. The rebellion collapsed, hangings followed in the north, and he watched neighbours go quiet for years. He never spoke of which cause he might have favoured, and the family later thought that silence a piece of shrewdness. What Harry knew of the family's other business he learned slowly, and by the edges. The Faulkners kept the Red Ledger, the tally begun by Hugh Faulkner in 1455 in the days of the Wars of the Roses, and it was not a subject a shepherd was asked to join. But sheep die in patterns, and Harry noticed patterns. When flocks on the high pasture were found drained and pale, with no wolf or dog to blame, it was Harry who noted which slopes it happened on, and he began, without quite deciding to, to bring word of it down to the Faulkner kin at Whalley. He was in effect a scout who never carried a weapon. Nesta's brother Ralph Faulkner was a vampire slayer, and Harry's hill knowledge served him well: he knew every fold, cave and drover's hut between the Ribble and the Wyre, and a slayer who hunted the fells at night needed a man who knew where the ground would not hold. His younger daughter turned that knowledge into a calling. Blanche Rishton grew into a watchful girl with her father's stillness, and when she came to her own work as a vampire slayer she used the lessons of the hill: how to lie in heather without a sound, how to read a wall for a gap, how to wait. Harry did not encourage her, and did not forbid her. He simply walked the fell with her at night for a season, saying nothing, and then stopped needing to. When the Armada summer of 1588 came, with beacons lit along the coast and the whole county on edge for a landing that never happened, he was forty-nine, and he stood on the ridge above Garstang with his daughters and watched the fire-line run down the hills toward Morecambe Bay. Blanche, then twenty-two, was more interested in the movements on the dark ground than in the beacons, and Harry, who saw it, said afterward that it was the night he stopped thinking of her as a girl. Grief came late and in the wrong order. Blanche died in 1602, aged thirty-six, and the loss of a child before her parents was the hardest thing that Harry, by then a grey and slow-walking man, had known. He continued to tend the ewes because there was no one else to tend them. Then, in 1603, in the year that Queen Elizabeth died and the plague came north again, he took a fever from a neighbour's household where he had sat up several nights helping through a difficult lying-in; the parish clerk wrote the cause of death as childbed, a fever taken from a birthing chamber and not a fault of any body of his own. He died that year, aged sixty-four, and was buried at Garstang. Nesta survived him by two years, and Tiffany Faulkner lived on until 1621. In the family's memory Harry Rishton is remembered as the quiet man at the edge of the ledger, one of those who never held a stake or a sword yet whose knowledge of the fells made other people's work possible. The Faulkner ledger keepers listed him, in a later hand, as a friend of the Red Ledger, and the entry beside his name is a single line about the sheep. Within the wider Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary households on which the great families quietly depended, and for the way a hunter's craft can be inherited from someone who never hunted at all.