Jane Bradford

Spouse of George Faulkner Sagar, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Jane Bradford was born in 1699 in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River valley, a hundred miles inland from the harbour towns where the family into which she married made its living. She came of shopkeeping people, and shopkeeping is the word that the family remembers her by even though the record's own phrase is more particular: she was a shopkeeper's wife, and she was one before she was a wife of a ferryman, having grown up behind a counter. Northampton in her childhood was a town of a few hundred souls on the edge of a frontier that was never entirely quiet, and the meeting house on the hill was also a refuge, a school and a granary. Jonathan Edwards was not yet preaching there, but his grandfather Solomon Stoddard had been minister for decades, and his sermons on the necessity of a lively faith set the tone of the town. The Bradford shop sat on the main street and dealt in everything the valley could not make for itself: salt, molasses, nails, needles, iron pots, powder and shot, English cloth, tea in small and costly quantities and rum in large ones. Jane learned to weigh, to measure and to reckon in the mixed currency of the colony, in which provincial paper bills, Spanish silver, and country pay in wheat and flax circulated at rates that changed with the season. She learned to hold a customer's credit in her head, to know which farmers paid at harvest and which paid at Christmas and which not at all, and to keep the peace when a neighbour disputed a bill. She had a small, clear voice and a very level gaze, and her mother used to say that Jane could make a man feel he had been treated generously while he was being charged the full price. Northampton's wars were nearer than Boston's. In 1704, when Jane was five, the French and their Abenaki and Mohawk allies destroyed Deerfield, only a few miles north up the river, killing many settlers and marching more than a hundred captives to Canada in the depth of winter. The shock ran through the whole valley. Jane grew up with a watchful habit: the household kept a musket by the door and a bucket by the hearth, and the children learned to sleep with their shoes at the bed's foot. The wars with France on the frontier, as the family later called them, were the shaping condition of her youth and middle years, and they gave her a practical fortitude that carried her through most of what followed. In 1717 she married George Faulkner Sagar, a ferryman of Haverhill, whom she had met, according to the family story, when her father took her down the river road to the coast on a buying trip and they crossed the Merrimack in his scow. She was eighteen and he was nineteen. He was broad, weathered and courteous, and she is said to have judged him within a minute by the way he handled the horse. The wedding was in Northampton, and she left the valley for the harbour country, taking with her a chest of linen, some property from her father, and an accounting hand that soon improved the finances of the ferry. Where George charged a fair price and forgot to write it down, she wrote it down. Where he had let a debt slide out of kindness, she gently reminded him of it. The ferry, under her, became a going concern. Their son Elijah Sagar was born in 1718, and their daughter Susanna Faulkner Sagar in 1722. Jane raised them in the low house near the landing, with the noise of the rope on the pulleys in the background. She taught both children to read and figure, kept a small shelf of books in the kitchen and made sure that they went to the town school in winter. Elijah, a sturdy, quiet boy, went into his father's trade; Susanna, sharp-tongued and quick, learned her mother's ways with money. It was a household in which there was little waste, a well-scrubbed floor and a steady supply of johnnycake and salt fish, and the family remembered the year's round of work: soap-boiling in spring, haying in July, the slaughter in November, and a stretch of dark evenings at the end of the year when everyone sat in the kitchen and mended. Jane was not a slayer, and it is not clear how much she knew of the Faulkner work that ran in her husband's mother's line. She married into a family in which certain kinsmen came and went, and in which George occasionally took the ferry out at night. A shopkeeper's daughter is not a fool. She understood that there were secrets in the house, and she chose, in the Bradford way, to treat them as a customer's private business. She was seen, on certain nights, leaving a lantern on the landing post and a pot of stew on the hearth for the men who came off the water at odd hours, and she never once asked George who they were. When he was gone she kept the confidence. The Red Ledger's Massachusetts keepers may not have noted her, but they knew what she was. George died in 1739 of a fever, when Jane was forty and the children were grown or nearly so. She did not remarry. She kept the house, put Elijah in charge of the boats and opened a small shop of her own in the front room, selling cloth, thread and tea to the women of the landing, and for twenty years it was a modest, profitable concern. She saw Elijah married and Susanna established, and she watched her grandchildren grow up. She had a reputation as a woman who could not be hurried and would not be cheated. Her end came in 1761, at the age of sixty-two, in an accident on the fells. The word is the family's own, a survival of the Lancashire speech of her husband's ancestors, applied in Massachusetts to the high rough pastures behind the town where cattle were sent in summer. She had walked out to look at a stray heifer of Elijah's on a day of thin drizzle, and she slipped on a wet ledge of rock, and was found the next morning. It was a plain and unremarkable death for a woman whose life had been a long defence against calamity, and the neighbours said afterward that she was the one person they would have expected to be careful. She is remembered in the family as a steady presence and a keeper of accounts. She had no craft and no ledger entry, but the household that held the Massachusetts ferry through the middle years of the eighteenth century held together under her hand. In the Slayerverse she has a small but secure place as one of the women who married into the Faulkner line and asked no questions, and who by doing so made the work possible.