The loom that Idonea Slater worked at for most of her life stood in a room above a Preston cookshop, and she used to say that she could tell the season by the smell coming up through the floorboards: tallow and onions in the dark months, fresh fish and hot bread once the Ribble began to run kindly. She was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1430, the year the boy king Henry VI was crowned in Westminster, though nothing that happened in London reached the Slater household except as a change in the price of wool. Her people were small townsfolk, neither farmers nor merchants, the sort who lived on the margin between the two. Family memory kept no names for her parents or brothers and sisters, and the ledgers, when they finally mentioned her, called her simply the weaver.
Preston in her childhood was a busy, muddy market town on a hill above the river, with a guild that met to regulate trade, a parish church of St John, and streets where sheep, geese and children shared the gutters. Lancashire was a poor county by the standards of the south, but it made cloth, and the coarse woollen stuffs of the region, sold in bolts and known in the markets as cottons though not a fibre of the plant was in them, went out along the packhorse roads to Chester and York. Idonea learned to card, comb, spin and finally weave before she was fifteen. The work was hard on the hands and the back. She stood at a broad loom with the shuttle thrown from hand to hand, and she built a reputation for even selvedges and a tight, dense weft that fullers liked to buy. Her cloth was undyed grey and russet for the most part, and once or twice a year, when a customer paid for it, a deep madder red.
She was small, broad in the shoulder from the loom, with pale eyes and a habit of counting under her breath when she worked, threads and picks and yards. People who knew her described her as dry rather than warm. She distrusted enthusiasm of any kind. She could be very funny in a flat, sidelong way, and she was slow to forgive a debt or a slight, but she never let a customer go without a cup of ale on a wet day. It was the counting that mattered later. A woman who kept accounts of her own cloth in her head, and could tell from the weight of a bolt whether it had been short-measured by a quarter yard, made a valuable partner for a man who was about to spend his life keeping tallies.
That man was Hugh Faulkner, born in 1428, a falconer's son who trained hawks for the great Lancastrian households of the county and who arrived in Preston in the autumn of 1452 with a gauntlet on his arm and a goshawk that would take no food from anyone but him. He sold hawks, and he needed cloth for hoods, jesses and a heavy coat against the moor weather. Idonea wove the coat. She always said afterwards that he argued the price down honestly and paid on the day, which was rarer than charm. They were married in 1453 in the parish church, with a small feast of pottage, mutton and oatcakes in the room over the cookshop, and afterwards she moved with him to the households and hunting country where his work took him, carrying her loom in pieces on a cart.
What she learned about the other side of his life, she learned gradually, and she was not a woman to swoon at it. Hugh was a vampire slayer, though the word was not much used then; the family said only that he went out at night on the business. Her own share in that business was chiefly practical. She wove the dark, close cloth of his hunting cloaks, stitched pockets into them for stakes and salt, and kept the household running when he vanished for days. In 1455, when the Wars of the Roses began at St Albans and the county began to divide itself between Lancaster and York, Hugh opened the Red Ledger, and Idonea was the first person he showed it to. She read it, checked his arithmetic against the tally on the tavern wall where he had first scratched his marks, and found two errors. He corrected them and thereafter asked her to look at each page before he sealed it.
Her children came into a house that was seldom quiet or settled. Amice Faulkner was born in 1456, Thomas Faulkner in 1458, and Quenild Faulkner in 1468, after a long gap that the family later said was filled with hard winters, short harvests and Hugh's long absences. Idonea taught all three to count before they could read, and to read before they could hold a bow. She was strict about sums and cloth-lengths and had less patience for stories of derring-do. When the boys of the neighbourhood came home with tales of Lancastrian victories at Wakefield or of the terrible snow at Towton in 1461, she made her own children sit at the loom and card wool while they listened. She wanted them to understand, she said, that the cost of a war was always tallied in someone's kitchen. Hugh brought back from Towton, in the following weeks, a tired silence that she recognised as the shape of the unresolved thing the ledgers later called the Guest. She did not ask him to speak about it.
She never became a slayer herself and never wished to. Yet among the women who lived beside slayers she was known as a steady centre. Neighbours sent for her when a household needed a shroud made in a hurry, or when a hunter had come back hurt and required a bed and a sharp tongue. She took in Hugh's occasional companions, feeding them and mending their cloaks, and it was in her kitchen that a friendly rivalry with Yorkshire hunters was first discussed as a matter of principle rather than of insult. She held no love for the Proctors of York, whom she had never met, but she was firm that nobody in her house was to speak of them as devils. Whatever the ledgers said, she would say, they were men who counted, and she respected that.
In the middle of the 1470s the country was quiet for a time, with Edward IV on the throne and the Lancastrian cause reduced to whispers. The quiet did not last for Idonea. A sweating sickness, sudden and pitiless, moved through Lancashire towns that summer, striking in the morning and killing by the night, and it took her in 1475, at the age of forty-five. Amice was then nineteen and about to be married; Thomas was seventeen; Quenild was a small child of seven who remembered mostly the smell of wet wool and the sound of the loom being stopped. Hugh buried her under the parish yard wall, and it was said that he sat for two nights with his hawk on his fist and did not speak. He never remarried.
Idonea left nothing that a historian could call an estate: a loom, a chest of good linen, the heavy cloak she had made for Hugh in 1453 and which he wore until it fell to pieces. What she left in the family was a habit. The Faulkner ledgers, in their oldest surviving hand, carry small marginal ticks beside certain entries, and the family tradition holds that these were her checking marks, kept up by her children long after she was dead. Her weaving pattern, a tight herringbone with a red thread running through every seventh pick, was copied by daughters and granddaughters for generations. Though she was never listed as a slayer, the Red Ledger's keepers came to regard her as its first auditor, the person who insisted that a tally be honest before it be proud. In the modern Slayerverse, where the descendants of Hugh's house still argue good-naturedly with the heirs of the White Ledger about who counted better, her dry, exact voice is the one they most often imagine in the room.
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