Heloise Faulkner

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

Heloise Faulkner was born in 1613 in Padiham, Lancashire, a small weaving town on the Calder where the sound of looms came out of half the cottages and where the church bell was never quite loud enough to cover them. Her father, Clement Widdop, was a saddler, and her mother, Avice Thwaites, a herbalist, so that her earliest memories were of leather and dried herbs, of the creak of a stitching-horse and the drip of a still. Her elder sister Helen Widdop, born in 1611, stood between her and the world for most of her childhood. The odd matter of the surname was one the family never troubled to explain: Heloise bore the Faulkner name, as her sister did not, and the ledgers put it down to the custom by which the name in the Red Ledger's household passed as the family saw fit. Padiham in her girlhood was a village of perhaps a thousand souls, set under the long flank of Pendle Hill. Its houses were stone, its fields small and stony, and its people spun and wove in their own front rooms, selling the finished cloth to the dealers who came up from Burnley and Colne. A girl in that country was set to the wheel early. Heloise carded wool at six, spun at eight and sat at a loom at twelve, and she found in it a happiness she could never have explained. The shuttle passing through the warp, the beater coming down, the slow growth of a piece of cloth in the light of the window seemed to her a kind of thinking. She became, by seventeen, a weaver of real skill, able to work twill and plain cloth with an evenness that the dealers remarked on, and a fine stripe that she designed herself. She was a small, brisk, freckled young woman, with the sort of dark, quick eyes that miss nothing, and she had a habit of humming while she worked. The hum was always the same tune, a border ballad she had learned from a Northumbrian pedlar, and it was by this tune that she was first noticed by Roland Thorne. He was a young man of the House of Thorne, born in 1617, and he had come south to Lancashire with his family, whose origins lay among the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches and whose later generations hunted in the hills. He recognised the ballad, and stopped in her street to ask where she had heard it. She said that a pedlar had taught it to her. He said that the pedlar was his uncle. Everything else followed from that. They married in 1638, when Heloise was twenty-five and Roland twenty-one, and their household was a curiously bookish one. Roland was a schoolmaster, a lean, careful man with a passion for Latin and a limp that came from a boyhood fall, and he taught in the grammar school and in the evenings kept a handful of private pupils at the kitchen table, while Heloise worked her loom in the corner and hummed. The house had one room for the family, one for the loom, and a loft in which Roland kept his books, a modest collection that the neighbours regarded with a certain awe. In 1641 their son Peter Thorne was born, and the house acquired a third rhythm to go with the loom and the lesson: the crying of a child, which Heloise said she found less distracting than the sound of a boy declining verbs. The civil wars split the northern gentry and disrupted the schools, and Roland's income, always small, shrank in the 1640s as families fled or ran short of money. Heloise's weaving kept the household. She took on more work than she could comfortably manage, wove cloth for soldiers' blankets and for shrouds, and once, memorably, for the banner of a local company whose colours she had not been told in advance. When she saw them she laughed until she cried and finished the job anyway. The money was what mattered. Roland taught in the daytime and mended the roof in the evening, and Peter grew up in a house where nobody wasted anything and nobody was ever hungry for long. Her connection to the Red Ledger was through her blood rather than her trade. She was not called, and neither was her husband, and her son Peter, when he came of age, was not called either. But the house on the edge of Padiham became one of the resting places on the Faulkner slayers' circuit, and the Thorne connection brought the borderers' habits into it: the shutters barred in a certain pattern, a lamp in a certain window, a jug of oatmeal water left on the sill on nights when a slayer might be passing. Heloise wove for the hunters, too, a rough, heavy cloth in dark colours that did not show blood, cut into long bandages and cloaks, which the Faulkners called Padiham grey. It was warm, tight and dull, and it turned a bite or a claw better than any wool of the county. She never took credit for the invention, saying only that she had woven what she would have wanted to wear. Her attitude to the White Ledger was mild and a little amused. She met Yorkshire weavers at the cloth fairs, and traded yarn with them, and she found them the same sort of people as Lancastrians, only slower to speak and quicker to bargain. She held that a feud that had been lasting since Towton was mainly good for the people who told stories about it. Roland, from the Thorne side, took the feud more seriously, since his people had feuds of their own that ran back further than any Faulkner's, and he sometimes lectured Peter at supper about the fatal expense of a long grudge. Heloise would hum through it, and the tune, they said, always seemed a little louder. The great plague year of 1665 was the last of her life, and the hardest. The winter that opened it was bitter, with frozen roads and a lasting frost that closed the looms in Padiham for weeks, and the cold went into Heloise's chest and would not leave. She died in 1665, at the age of fifty-two, of a hard winter. Roland, who had nursed her through the worst weeks, died in the same year, and the family papers record that the two were buried close together in the churchyard at Padiham, so that the schoolmaster and the weaver lay side by side. Peter lived on until 1680, and carried their Latin books and her last piece of cloth with him. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the weaver of Padiham grey, the woman whose cloth kept the hunters warm, and whose quiet tune outlasted the feuds she never much cared for.