Ida Sherman Faulkner

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

Ida Sherman Faulkner was born in 1809 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and kept a shop for more than forty years, first in the Connecticut valley and then in the industrial town of Worcester. She was the daughter of the carpenter Asa Sherman and the milliner Nancy Faulkner, a cousin by blood to the slayers of the Red Ledger, and the wife of the carpenter Warren Chandler, whom she married in 1831. She raised two sons, Asa Faulkner Chandler and Henry Faulkner, both of whom became vampire slayers. She was not a hunter herself, and she said so often and with a certain firmness, but she was the one who told her husband the truth on the third night of the marriage, and who, for forty years, ran a household in which both a carpenter's bench and a slayer's gun case were kept in good order. She died in 1872 of a long illness, at sixty-three, a year after her husband. Her father, Asa Sherman, born in 1781 at Springfield and dead in 1839, was a carpenter and cabinetmaker of the Connecticut valley, a steady, even-tempered man who built houses, staircases and furniture that have outlasted the families who owned them. Her mother, Nancy Faulkner, born in 1779 and dead in 1840, was the youngest of the four children of the printer and slayer Caleb Faulkner, known as The Lexington Courier. Nancy had not been called to the hunt, unlike her three elder siblings, and had become a milliner, and then a carpenter's wife. The marriage was a happy one. Ida grew up in a household full of hats, wood shavings and the smell of glue. She had one brother, Lewis Faulkner Sherman, born in 1811, who would become a militiaman. Northampton in the first years of the century was a prosperous valley town of some two thousand people, with a wide main street lined with elms, a courthouse, a meeting house with a tall steeple, and a great many taverns. It lay on the Connecticut River in the middle of a rich and level country of meadows, onion fields and tobacco barns, and was the market town for a dozen villages around. Its people were comfortable, churchgoing and inclined to argument. The old minister, Jonathan Edwards, had been dismissed from the pulpit sixty years earlier for being too strict, and the town still had a reputation for testing its clergy. Ida grew up in a two-storey house on a side street, near the common, built by her father, with a workshop at the back and a bow window at the front in which her mother displayed her best bonnets. She was a quiet, exact, rather solemn child, who liked to keep things in order. At five she was arranging her mother's ribbons by colour. At eight she could do a column of figures in her head, and at ten she was keeping the household accounts. Her mother, who was no scholar, was proud of her, and taught her what she knew: how to cut a pattern, how to bind a brim, how to tell the quality of a straw, how to judge a customer's purse by her gloves. Her father taught her to use a plane. She was the only girl in the street who could cut a clean joint, a skill which, she discovered later, was not generally prized at dances. The trade she took up, at eighteen, was storekeeping. There was a small general shop on Pleasant Street that came up for sale in 1827, and her father, who had been putting by for the purpose, lent her the money. She stocked it with what the neighbourhood needed: tea, sugar, candles, thread, calico, tinware, nails, bonnets and a good many sundries. It was a modest business, and she ran it with the same exactness that she had given to her mother's ribbons. She was a fair dealer, a careful buyer and a difficult woman to cheat, and her customers, who were mostly farm wives and mill girls, came to rely on her. By twenty she had paid back her father and had money in the savings bank. It was in the summer of 1830 that she met Warren Chandler. He was a travelling carpenter, twenty-two, a thickset, red-faced young man with a thatch of sandy hair, who had been hired to rebuild the front of the shop next to hers, and who came in one morning to borrow a bucket. She lent it to him on the understanding that it would be returned. It was returned at eight o'clock the next morning, along with a small stool that he had made overnight from a block of cherry, and which, she observed, had been carefully sanded. She said that she had not asked for a stool. He said that nobody had asked for the bucket, either, and that he had thought it only fair. She sold him a pound of nails at a price that would have ruined a less experienced man. He came back for another pound the next day. They were married in the spring of 1831, and moved to Worcester, where he had his business. She sold her shop in Northampton to a cousin, packed her ledgers, and took a place on the Boston road, in a small brick building next to the new stage office, where she opened another. Worcester was a good place for a shop. It was on the main road, it was growing rapidly, and in 1835, with the opening of the railroad to Boston, it grew faster. The people who poured into it, mill hands, machinists, railway men, clerks, needed everything, and she sold them all of it. By 1840 she had two assistants and a reputation for fair prices. It was on the third night of the marriage that she told him about the Red Ledger. She had worried about it for some weeks. She had been told by her mother, who had kept it from her own husband for a year, that it was best done gradually, and by an aunt that it was best done at once. She chose the kitchen, at night, and she put the kettle on first. She explained, carefully, that the Faulkners were a very old family of hunters, who had hunted for three hundred years, that her cousins were slayers of the Red Ledger, that she herself was not, and that if he wished to leave, she would understand. He listened to it all, in his slow way. Then he went down to the cellar with a lamp and looked at the locks. He said that they were not good locks. He fitted three new ones the next day. She handled the Ledger's side of the household. The Faulkner hunters of central Massachusetts, who came through Worcester in some numbers, found in the shop on the Boston road a reliable post. They could leave letters there, pick up supplies, exchange news and, if necessary, rest in the room upstairs. She kept a small ledger of her own, in a cipher that she had devised herself from the price list, in which each entry looked like an order for nails and was in fact a record of a hunter's movements. It was kept in the drawer under the till, and there was never any confusion about which was which. Her sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Asa Faulkner Chandler was born in 1833 and lived until 1912, and Henry Faulkner was born in 1834 and lived until 1914. Asa was called at sixteen and Henry in his twenties, and both became vampire slayers of the Red Ledger. She had hoped, privately, that they would not be. She had hoped it in the way that a person hopes that the weather will hold. When the elder told her, she said only that she had supposed so, and went to the back room and cried for a quarter of an hour, and came out and sold a yard of calico to a customer, with a face that gave nothing away. She brought them up on a simple rule, which was that the family came first and the work came second, and that neither was ever to be discussed at table. She taught them to keep accounts, to be punctual and to write a legible hand, and she made them promise, when they went out, to leave a note on the kitchen shelf saying when they would be back. It was a rule that the cousins of the Ledger came to adopt, and it is said to have saved several lives. Her husband's death in the autumn of 1871, after a fall from a scaffold, was the sharpest grief of her life. She had been ill for some months with a wasting complaint, and she was in bed when they carried him in. She sat up, took his hand, and did not let go of it until morning. She did not recover. She lived on through the winter, growing weaker, and died in the spring of 1872, at sixty-three. The shop was taken over by her younger son's wife. The ledger with the price list cipher was found in the drawer under the till, and was kept. Ida Sherman Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the shopkeeper of Worcester, the cousin who kept the books for the hunters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the counter, who ran an unseen network out of a till drawer and taught a generation of slayers to leave a note on the kitchen shelf.