Isabel Rishton

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

The mill at Colne stood where the water fell steepest, a low building of gritstone with a roof of heavy stone slates, and it was there in 1516 that Isabel Rishton was born, in a house that smelled by turns of wet grain, malt and lime. She was the daughter of Fulk Rishton, a mason's apprentice, and of Idonea Faulkner, a brewster, and because the family lived in the millhouse and the stones were the first sound she knew, Colne remembered her all her life as the miller's daughter. The Faulkner name came to her through her mother, and it mattered. Idonea belonged to a cadet stock of the Lancashire Faulkners, the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, and her people had taken the ledger's arithmetic into the ordinary business of the county without ever drawing attention to it. Colne in those years was a small market town on the edge of the moors, with an old church, a cluster of weavers' cottages and a great deal of weather. The land around it was sheep country: thin turf, stone walls that climbed straight up the hillsides, and farms that lived by wool, oatcake and a little barley. The abbeys of Whalley and Sawley held much of the ground, and the monks were landlords, lenders and employers all at once, so that a girl born in 1516 grew up in a world in which the church owned the pasture, the tithe barn and the price of malt. Isabel's father worked on abbey stone as an apprentice, cutting and squaring blocks for a barn wall, then a gatehouse repair, and came home with dust in his hair and a mason's habit of tapping a surface with his knuckle to hear whether it was sound. Her brother Oliver Faulkner, three years older, was the one who went about with the men and learned the roads. Isabel stayed nearer the mill. She learned to judge a sack by lifting it, to tell from the sound of the stones when the grain was running too dry, and to reckon the miller's toll, which was taken in kind and had to be tallied to the last peck. Her mother taught her the other reckoning, at the brewhouse door, where ale was measured in gallons and quarts and chalked up on a board against the names of customers who had not paid. Idonea kept her accounts on tally sticks and, when she could get a scrap of paper, in a small hand of her own. By twelve Isabel could read that hand, and by fourteen she had made one of her own that her mother trusted with the sums. It was this habit of setting things down, more than any bravery, that tied her to the family's older work. The Faulkners of that generation did not talk about the ledger to a girl who was not sworn to it, but the household of a brewster is a place where people come in from the road at odd hours, and Isabel noticed which of her mother's callers asked for a bed and no ale, which of them left before light, and how Idonea afterwards went quietly to a chest and wrote a line she would not read aloud. She learned not to ask. She learned instead to have a loaf and a bowl of pottage set by, to keep a lamp trimmed in the loft, and to say nothing in the market when a stranger with a bandaged hand had been seen leaving by the back lane. In the vocabulary of the Red Ledger she was a keeper of the door, and there were many such women, unrecorded except in the pattern of who was fed. The great disturbance of her youth came in the autumn of 1536, when Lancashire and Yorkshire rose against the king's commissioners over the closing of the smaller monasteries, and the mood of the north went into the streets. Isabel was twenty. Her father Fulk had died the previous year, and his work at the abbey stone had died with him, so that the household felt the loss of the monks' custom directly. The rising, which history calls the Pilgrim's rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, passed through the Ribble valley like a fever, with muster calls in the villages and parish banners carried out onto the moor. In 1537 the abbots of Whalley and Sawley were hanged for their part in it, and the great church at Whalley went silent. The mill, which had ground for the abbey, now ground for whoever paid, and the lord who took the abbey lands took the mill's rent as well. Isabel watched her neighbours divide over whether the king was a tyrant or merely a bad bargain, and she is remembered in the family as one who kept her own counsel while both parties ate at her mother's table. Idonea died in 1540, and it was then that Isabel became in truth the miller's daughter, standing at the hopper alone with her brother Oliver often on the road. She did not marry. The Faulkner papers give no romantic reason, and family memory offers only that suitors came and were sent away with a sack of meal and a polite remark about the weather. It seems more likely that she was needed. The mill was a place where a household of hunters could rest without questions, and a wife would have belonged to another house. She kept the mill's accounts, and beside them a second book, plainly ruled, in which she copied out the Faulkner tallies as they were brought to her by cousins passing north, so that one more copy of the Red Ledger existed in Colne than the family formally knew of. When Oliver came home, she counted his entries against those of the men he rode with, and she was the first to notice the years when the Faulkner column lagged behind the White Ledger of the Proctors. Her manner was dry and exact. Neighbours in Colne called her sharp, and it was meant kindly: a woman who could not be cheated on a peck of oats and who let a debtor off at Michaelmas with a look that made him pay double the next year. She wore a linen coif pinned tight, a russet gown in winter and a wool kirtle in every other season, and carried a ring of keys she never let go. She was not a slayer, and the lore is careful on the point: she carried no stakes, made no hunts, and was never called. But she stood, night after night, in a doorway with a lantern, and the Faulkner cousins who found it lit understood that they were expected and that their reckoning would be heard. She sheltered them through the changes of the Tudor crown: the Edwardian reforms, when the parish images were whitewashed; the brief Marian return of the old Mass; and the settlement of Elizabeth's first years. In each of them she attended whatever service was legal and kept the ledger business out of every sermon. In the last years of her life, the north rose again. In 1569 the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland raised their banners for the old faith and were crushed, and the reprisals fell hard on the country from Durham to the Pennines. Isabel was fifty-three. The mill was searched twice, and it is told that on the second occasion the officers found a tally stick, a chalk board and a cold pot of ale, and went away having learned that the brewster's daughter kept an orderly house. The family credits her with hiding a wounded cousin in the stone hopper loft for eleven days without a soul in Colne breathing a word. Isabel Rishton died in 1575, aged fifty-nine, of old age, in the millhouse where she was born. She was buried in the churchyard at Colne within a short walk of the water. Her private copy of the Red Ledger passed to the Faulkner cousins, who found that she had added at its end a list of every night a lantern had been lit and every bed provided, forty years of them, and beneath it a single line saying that the debt was not owed. Descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, she was one of the thousands of relatives whose work is recorded not in tallies of vampires taken but in the quiet infrastructure of the Faulkner cause. Slayerverse chroniclers remember her as the door-keeper of Colne, the woman whose lamp was never allowed to go out.