Humphrey Faulkner

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

The mill at Clitheroe stood where the water ran quick below the castle rock, and the sound of it, a low grinding rumble under every other noise, was the first thing Humphrey Faulkner knew. He was born there in 1541, the younger son of Maurice Faulkner, a miller's son who had inherited the wheel and the right to grind the tenants' corn, and of Meg Thorne, who had come into the Faulkner household from the dairy sheds of the Ribble country. His elder brother Sampson Faulkner, born in 1539, was already a solid two-year-old who wandered the mill floor covered in flour. Humphrey was the small, quiet one who watched, and he kept that habit of watching all his life. His mother was gone almost before he could remember her. Meg Thorne was a dairymaid by trade and, in the family's private accounting, a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne, the border-reiver blood that had drifted south from Northumberland and left its hard, patient hunters scattered in the dairies and farmsteads of the Pennine edge. She was known in the ledgers as the Still Beacon, a name that came from her way of standing perfectly motionless on a hillside at dusk, a pale figure with a lantern shuttered to a slit, until the thing she was waiting for came close enough to be dealt with. She died in 1542, when Humphrey was a year old and she was thirty, and the household never spoke of the manner of it in front of the boys. Whatever the mill-yard gossips said, Maurice kept a shut mouth, and the two sons grew up knowing their mother chiefly through a wooden milking stool she had carved and a cloth cap that still smelled faintly of cheese. Growing up in a widower's mill was a rough schooling in useful things. Maurice was a big, floury, tired man who worked from the first light, and the boys were set to the sacks and the hoppers as soon as they could lift them. Humphrey learned how the stones were dressed with a mill-bill and a hammer, how to listen to the wheel to tell whether it was running true, how to judge the moisture in a heap of barley by the feel of it between finger and thumb. He learned to read the customers as well as the grain. A miller in Tudor Lancashire was regarded with suspicion by half the parish, since everyone assumed he took too much toll, and Humphrey was the son who could talk a furious farmer round, mostly by saying almost nothing and letting the man run out of breath. The mill was the village's true centre, and men who came to wait for their grinding talked about everything, including the things that did not appear in sermons: the lights on the moor, the animals found dead and dry, the traveller nobody could place. The religious changes of the age arrived in the valley without ceremony. Humphrey was a small boy when the old Mass was replaced by English prayers under the boy king, then a lad when Queen Mary put the altars back, and a young man of seventeen when Elizabeth came to the throne and the pendulum swung again. The parish clerk at Clitheroe had learned to bow to whichever wind was blowing. Humphrey, according to a later family remark, took from all this a deep dislike of certainty in other men, and a habit of keeping his own beliefs in his pocket. He attended church, paid his tithe and made no speeches. If asked about doctrine he talked about the price of oats. He never married, and the family gave several reasons over the generations, none of them confirmed. Some said he had been attached in youth to a girl who chose another; some said the mill left no time; some thought that a boy who lost his mother to the ledger's business at a year old learned young what it cost a household. Humphrey himself was said to have called it a sensible economy. His brother Sampson married Dionisia Tempest in 1565, and Humphrey, at twenty-four, became the resident uncle, the steady figure in the mill loft whom the children ran to and who told no lies about wolves. He carried Toby on his shoulders to see the beacon-fires and taught Norman to whistle through a blade of grass. When Maurice died in 1566 Humphrey was twenty-five and took over the wheel in fact if not in name, and Sampson, who liked the road and the cattle better than the mill, gladly left it to him. He was, in a small way, the ledger's ear. The Red Ledger had never been kept by the millers, but the Faulkner ledger-keepers of the north used Humphrey the way they used any well-placed man: as someone who heard things. He heard when a shepherd from Bowland came in with a story about a man who walked across the top of a frost without leaving prints. He heard, in the terrible autumn of 1569, when the northern earls rose and the gentry hurried past his door with chests and armed servants, which lanes had been closed and which barns held frightened people, and he passed on what mattered to the Faulkner cousins who watched over the district. He took no part in fighting, then or later, and kept a stout ash pole behind the mill door for no reason he cared to explain. Beyond that he preferred to leave the hunting to his mother's kin, who came through occasionally with mud on their boots and left again before dawn. His pride, insofar as he had any, was the mill itself. Through four decades he rebuilt the wheel twice, replaced the wooden cogs with hard crab-apple and hornbeam, and cut a better leat from the river so that the mill kept turning in the dry summers that starved the other wheels along the Ribble. In the Armada summer of 1588, when a beacon burned on Pendle Hill and every man of the parish was ordered to muster, Humphrey, aged forty-seven, was told to keep the mill grinding for the county's stores, and he counted that the most useful war service he ever gave. Younger people in the town remembered him as a spare, grey-bearded man with a permanent white dusting in his eyebrows and a way of tilting his head toward a sound as though the mill spoke to him. In the last winter of his life the cold settled in his chest and stayed. A winter cough was no unusual thing in that damp country and he ignored it for weeks, grinding right up to the week of Twelfth Night, until he could no longer climb the loft ladder. Humphrey Faulkner died in 1607, aged sixty-six, with the wheel turning in the frost beneath him, and his nephews carried him to the churchyard in a sack-cloth shroud that smelled of meal. He left no widow and no children; the mill passed to the family of his brother, along with a plain wooden stool that had belonged to a woman he could barely remember. The Faulkner ledger keepers gave him a modest entry, a line noting the mill, the years, and the phrase that he "heard all the valley's business and kept it." In the wider Slayerverse he stands as a reminder that the Red Ledger rested on many people who never took a single tally themselves, and that a man who lost a Thorne mother in his infancy could still spend sixty-six years listening, patiently, to the dark on the family's behalf.