Ida Faulkner

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

Ida Faulkner was born in 1803 in the harbour town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, and spent more than twenty years as a schoolteacher in the mill towns and fishing ports of New England. She was the elder child of the teamster Daniel Sevier and the midwife and vampire slayer Sally Faulkner Hale, known in the Red Ledger as The Bitter Sentinel. She never married and had no children of her own, and she died in 1845 of the sweating sickness, at the age of forty-two. She was not a hunter. She was, in the family's phrase, the one who taught the children of the hunters to read and to hold their tongues, and she was for twenty years the only person in the Faulkner family who kept a proper account of where everyone was. Her parents had married in 1802, when both were in their teens, and Ida was born the following year, in a rented room above a chandler's shop near the Marblehead wharves. Her father Daniel, a Worcester man, was then hauling dried cod from the harbour to the Boston market, a short, rough and profitable run, and the young couple had followed the freight. Her mother Sally, who was not yet twenty, was learning midwifery from an old Marblehead woman who delivered the fishermen's children, and who took the girl with her on night calls, so that Ida's earliest memories were of being left asleep on a neighbour's settle while her mother went out into the dark with a bag. The town itself was a crowded, rocky, salt-stained place, built on granite ledges around a deep harbour, with lanes so narrow that two carts could not pass, and a population of some five thousand who lived on cod and quarrelled about everything. Its men were out on the Grand Banks for months at a time, and its women ran the town, which gave a child a particular idea of what a woman could do. The family did not stay. The Sevier wagon was always moving, and in a few years the household had gone on to Ipswich, where her brother Albert was born in 1807, and later to other towns along the coast road, where her father found freight and her mother found confinements. Ida remembered them as a series of kitchens, each with a different smell, and as a succession of neighbours' schools, where she was sent in the morning with a slate and a piece of bread and cheese. She had one great advantage over the other children, which was that her mother could read and write well and had taught her from the age of four, so that in every new school she found herself ahead of the class and in danger of being set to teach it. By eleven she was listening to the little ones say their letters. By fourteen she was being paid for it. Her father died in 1821, of a winter cough, when she was eighteen, and the household changed. Sally, who had been hunting for some years, took the work up more seriously, and the two children were left a good deal to themselves. Ida, who was already the steadier of the two, found that the family's affairs had come to rest on her. She kept the accounts, paid the rent, looked after her brother, and answered the letters, in a careful, unremarkable hand, that came from the Red Ledger's cousins in Salem and Worcester. She was the first person in the family to see how the letters, taken together, told a story. A cousin in Newburyport wrote of a woman who did not come to church. A cousin in Lynn wrote of a pedlar who did not sleep. She filed them in a box, in date order, with the name of each place written on the back. She did it, she said, because she could not bear a muddle. It was in her twenties that she became a teacher in earnest. The New England of the 1820s was building schools as fast as it could find the money, and the mill towns, growing quickly on the rivers that turned their wheels, were short of women who could keep a room of sixty children in order. Ida, who could, found work at once. She taught a district school in a village near Andover, a dame school on the Merrimack, an infant room in a factory town where the owner paid for the teacher and the children came in at six in the morning after a night's work at the looms. She was a small, pale, straight-backed young woman, with grey eyes and a low, carrying voice, and she had a way of standing perfectly still when a class was noisy, so that it fell silent out of curiosity. The children called her Miss Faulkner and were rather afraid of her, and most of them, in later life, said that she was the best teacher they had known. Her teaching was plain and exact. She drilled her pupils in the alphabet, the multiplication table, the spelling book and the catechism, and she required every child to write a line a day in a copy book, in a clear hand, without blots. She disliked the birch, and used it seldom. She preferred, when a child misbehaved, to ask a question, in a quiet voice, about why it had been done, and to go on asking until the child ran out of answers. It was a method she had learned at home. A child who has watched a mother interrogate a pedlar at the kitchen door knows how a question works. The hunters came to her for the same reason. A hunter passing through a town needed to know whether a particular family could be trusted, who had recently moved in, who had left and who had taken sick, and a schoolmistress knew all of it, because she knew the children, and children talk. Ida did not pry. She listened to what the little ones told her at the morning hour, about the new neighbour who slept all day or the cousin who had come to stay and never went out, and she set it down at night, with no names, on a sheet of paper that went to her mother. Sally, who found it more reliable than half the tavern gossip she was used to, said so. Ida said it was only what they told her. Her mother's work stood between them, and they did not often speak of it. Sally was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger and Ida was not, and the difference was handled with a politeness that other families might have found odd. Sally would arrive at her daughter's lodging late at night, muddy and silent, and be given a meal and a bed. In the morning she would be gone. Ida would wash the cup. It was understood between them that the one would do the work and the other would keep the house, and that neither would ask the other to be different. She never married. There was a young minister, in Andover, who asked her twice, and whom she liked, and who in the end went off to a church in the West and sent her, every Christmas for ten years, a parcel of books. She said that she had a great many children already. It was more or less true. She taught six hundred of them, by her own reckoning, and corresponded with a number of them until the end. Her younger brother Albert was the great affection of her life. She looked after him as a boy, found him his apprenticeship as a carpenter, and in his twenties kept house for him in a small rented cottage near the Ipswich river. He was gentler than she was and a good deal less tidy. She mended his shirts, corrected his spelling and made him write to their mother. When in 1854 he died of pneumonia, she was not there to see it, because she had died nine years before him, and it is her brother's letters to her, kept after her death by a cousin, that tell most of what is known of her last years. She fell ill in the late summer of 1845, during an outbreak of the fever that her doctor called the sweating sickness, and which had come that year from the ports along the coast. It was a quick and dreadful illness, with a high fever, a drenching sweat and a failing pulse, and it killed a dozen people in the village within a fortnight. She taught until the day she could not stand. Her last pupils, who came to her bedside in a line, to say goodbye, were given each a copy of the spelling book, with her name in the front. She died on a morning in September, at forty-two. Ida Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the schoolmistress of the Merrimack towns, the quiet daughter who kept the letters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers who raised the children of a hidden war, and taught them, among the ordinary subjects, how to notice what was wrong.