Helen Widdop

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

Helen Widdop was born in 1611 in Blackburn, Lancashire, in a house on the lane that ran down from the church to the river Blakewater, where the smell of tanning liquor from the yards below mixed with the smell of leather from her father's workshop. Her father, Clement Widdop, was a saddler, a careful and unsentimental man who made harness for the carriers and the gentlemen's stables of the Ribble valley and who kept his accounts on a slate that he wiped clean every Saturday night. Her mother, Avice Thwaites, was a herbalist, and it was from her that Helen learned that a household is a kind of pharmacy: that comfrey went in the poultice and feverfew in the tea, that the elder tree had to be asked before it was cut, and that a woman who knew the names of plants was welcome at any bedside in the parish. Blackburn in the first decades of the seventeenth century was a market town of a few thousand people, known for its coarse woollen and linen cloths, and a place where the hand-loom trade was steadily replacing the older farming life of the surrounding hills. The weekly market brought in farmers from Darwen and Mellor and cloth dealers from Manchester, and the streets on market day were thick with mud, sheep and argument. The church of St Mary stood over it all, and the religious mood of the town was serious, plain and slightly suspicious of anything that smelled of Rome or of the old customs. Helen was baptised there, learned her letters from her mother's psalter, and grew up knowing exactly how much each of her neighbours owed at the saddler's and how much they were likely to pay. Her younger sister Heloise, born in 1613 at Padiham, carried the Faulkner name, and this was the arrangement that governed the family: the Faulkner blood ran through the household, the surname came and went, and the two girls were understood by everyone who mattered to belong to the Red Ledger's people, though neither was ever called to hunt. Helen accepted this without visible sorrow. She was not a slayer, and she said, when asked, that she could not hold a stake straight for laughing. What she could do was keep a house where a slayer might come in at four in the morning with his sleeves wet and be given hot broth without a question, and this, in a Lancashire where such visitors were common enough, was a kind of service the ledgers valued more than they admitted. By her twenties she had become known in Blackburn as a woman of quiet authority. She was tall, sallow and straight-backed, with a habit of folding her arms over her apron as she listened, and she had the sort of face that people told things to. Her mother's herb garden became hers, and by the middle of the 1630s she was selling dried simples at the Saturday market alongside the cheese sellers. The record calls her a shopkeeper's wife, and it is the one detail of her life that has always puzzled the family, for no husband is entered beside her name in any register, and the dossier of the ledgers lists no marriage and no children. The most likely explanation, which the family has accepted for generations, is that the title was one of courtesy, earned by the years she kept a small shop in the town, weighing out spices, candles and remedies with the assurance of a woman who owned the place. Whatever the truth, she was addressed as Mistress Widdop and she answered to it. The civil wars split the northern gentry, and Blackburn felt it early. The hundred of Blackburnshire was a Parliamentary district in sympathy, but its gentry families were divided, and in the 1640s soldiers of both sides passed through demanding quarter, horses and money. Helen was in her thirties. She kept the shop open through requisitions, and she took in a Parliamentary trooper with a fever and a Royalist clerk with a wound, dressing both with her mother's remedies and putting them out on the same morning, on the same road, in opposite directions. Her father Clement died in 1644, the year of Marston Moor, and she buried him during a week when the town was half emptied by conscription. Her mother Avice lived on until 1656, and Helen looked after her in the last years, learning at that bedside the last of what her mother knew. Her sister Heloise married into House of Thorne in 1638 and moved to a schoolmaster's house in another town, but the two women wrote to each other in the winters and met at the fairs. The letters that survive from the family papers are short and practical, an exchange of recipes and news of the price of oatmeal, and they show a friendship that had no need of speech. Helen took an interest in the fortunes of her sister's son, sending him sugared almonds each Christmas and, on one occasion, a small silver spoon, which the ledgers note as her most extravagant purchase. She never resented being childless. She said that she had the whole street's children in and out of the shop, and that this was more than enough. Her relationship to the rivalry between the two families was that of an onlooker with a good view. The Proctors and Faulkners exchanged their tallies through intermediaries, and Blackburn, lying between the Lancashire and Yorkshire roads, was a convenient place for messages to be left. A small wooden box behind the counter of Helen's shop served for a time as a dead-letter drop, where a Faulkner rider could leave a folded page and a Proctor courier could take it up on his way to Skipton. She read none of it, or so she said, and nobody ever caught her out. She thought the whole business of blaming one family for the Guest's escape at Towton a piece of collective stubbornness, and once told a young Faulkner nephew, in front of witnesses, that a two-hundred-year-old argument was a poor thing to inherit. She died in 1662 at the age of fifty-one, of a winter cough that settled on her chest in January and did not lift. The remedies she had made for others did nothing for her, and she is said to have laughed at that, softly, from the bed. She was buried in the churchyard at Blackburn beside her parents, and the shop was sold to a neighbour who kept the counter and her scales. In the family's telling she is the patient householder of the Red Ledger, the woman whose kitchen was a refuge, and whose quiet hospitality kept the hunters fed and their secrets kept. In the wider Slayerverse she is remembered less for what she did than for what she made possible, a reminder that every tally entered in the ledger was, at some hour, warmed by someone's fire.