Jane Faulkner

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

Jane Faulkner was born in 1640 at Padiham, Lancashire, a stone-built cloth village on the Calder where the hills of Pendle stood on the northern skyline and were spoken of, in her childhood, with a lowered voice. Her father, Ivo Faulkner, was a yeoman with a small holding of pasture and oats on the edge of the township, and her mother, Jane Nowell, the daughter and wife of shopkeepers, had brought a little money and a good deal of sharp opinion to the marriage. The child was named for her mother, and the two Janes were known in the village as the elder and the lesser. It was a household of lamb and oatcake and small beer, of boiled bacon on Sundays, of a Bible read aloud at supper, and of the ordinary anxiety of a family that farmed poor land through the last years of the Civil War. The house was Faulkner, and the Faulkners carried the Red Ledger, but Ivo's branch carried it at one remove. He belonged to the sort of cadet line that heard about the tally at wedding feasts and funerals and did not do the work. He knew the story of Hugh Faulkner and the ledger opened in 1455 in the Wars of the Roses, and he could recite the family grievance against the Proctors and the vampire the ledgers call the Guest, who escaped at Towton in 1461, but he was no slayer and did not pretend to be. Jane grew up on the outer rim of the family's secret, close enough to feel its warmth and far enough that she was never asked to join it. That distance shaped her. She became a woman who wished to be useful to the hunters without being one of them, and who found in the plants of the hedge and the fell a way to do it. When Jane was a small child the household broke in two. Ivo took his wife, who was carrying a second child, across the Atlantic to Massachusetts in the early 1640s, in the tide of Lancashire and Yorkshire families who were leaving for the meeting-house colonies, and left Jane behind in Padiham in the care of her father's sister, a widow of the village who had no children and a large kitchen garden. Her sister Mercy Faulkner, born in 1641 on the far side of the ocean, was for many years no more to Jane than a name in a letter. Jane's mother, Jane Nowell, died in 1659, and the news reached Padiham in the spring on a ship's boy's letter, months after the burial. By then Jane was nineteen and already her aunt's partner in a trade that neither of them quite named. The aunt's garden made her a herbalist. In the seventeenth century the word covered everything from a woman who sold camomile for a stomach ache to a cunning-woman who brewed things at midnight, and Jane spent her working life carefully on the safe side of that line. She grew borage, comfrey, feverfew, wormwood, rue and hyssop in raised beds behind the aunt's cottage, went out in June with a basket and a knife for the elder flowers, and in autumn dug roots on the moor. She learned from an old copy of Culpeper's herbal, a book that the Padiham curate disapproved of, and from the women of the village who came to her door with their children's coughs and their husbands' bad backs. She dispensed syrups, poultices and tinctures for pennies or a loaf. She was known for her honesty about what did not work. Her real value to the Faulkners was quieter still. The slayers of Lancashire came to her back door with wounds, and she treated them without asking. Bruised ribs, dislocated shoulders and a great many bites that were not dogs' all came to her table. She used a poultice of comfrey and plantain on torn flesh, packed the wound with honey, and sat up through the night watching for the fevers that follow. A cousin of the family said that half the hunters of the Calder valley owed her their arms and legs. She also kept, in a locked drawer, the dried herbs the old Lancashire tradition held as harmful to vampires, and she supplied garlic, wolfsbane and the crushed thorn of the hawthorn, not because she believed that she could stop the creatures with them but because the men who went out believed it and were braver for the bundle in their coat. She never called herself anything more than a woman with a garden. She never married. Several men asked, and it was said in Padiham that she refused a Colne wool factor with a house of his own and a burgess's coat, and that she once told a curate she had already got a husband in her herb beds, who was inclined to be moody but never unfaithful. The truth was more practical. Her aunt died in the 1660s and left her the cottage, and the garden and the callers at the back door filled her days completely. She wanted no husband who would have opinions about what came in at night. She did have friends, and the closest were among the Faulkner women who came to buy her tinctures and stay to talk, and she had the letters from Massachusetts that arrived once or twice a year. She and her sister Mercy corresponded for thirty years without ever meeting, exchanging seeds and cuttings wrapped in wet cloth, recipes for cough syrup and reports of ill weather, and the occasional cautious line about the hunting on each side of the water. The great plague year of 1665 touched her most nearly in the matter of fear. The plague was in London, and although it hardly crossed the Pennines, the county lived in dread of it for two summers and the roads were watched. Jane, who had never been in the capital, made a fumigant of rue, juniper and rosemary for the households of Padiham, and turned away no one who came for it. When the Glorious Revolution came in 1688 she was forty-eight years old, and she remembered it chiefly as a season of odd travellers on the roads and a run on her cordials, since the county's nervous gentry laid in medicines the way they laid in powder. The old grievance with the Proctors of Yorkshire she treated with a shrug. She had met one Proctor herself, she used to say, a cheerful man selling saddles at Skipton fair, and he had asked her the price of comfrey in exactly the same tone as any Lancashire man. She died in 1692, aged fifty-two, in an accident on the fells. She had gone up on a wet October morning to dig gentian and valerian roots from the boggy ground below the moor, alone as she often was, and the way back crossed a steep gill that a night's rain had turned to a slick of black peat. She was found the following day by a shepherd's boy at the foot of the slope, her basket beside her and the roots still wrapped in their sacking. It was reckoned a mishap and buried as one, in Padiham churchyard, with a great many of the cottagers of the district standing at the gate, for whom she had done a good deal and who did not know the half of it. Her father Ivo Faulkner had died in 1684, eight years before her, and her sister Mercy in 1693, the year after, so that the two daughters left the world almost together, one on each side of the ocean. Jane's legacy is not in the ledger, which has no line for her, but in the family's habit afterwards of keeping a herb bed and a healing woman somewhere near the hunters. Padiham remembered her as the herbalist of the Calder valley, and the Faulkner cadet line that knew the truth set aside a page in the margin of the Red Ledger, in a much later hand, to record that many of the entries above it survived only because of her poultices. In the Slayerverse she stands as the clearest example of a Faulkner who served the tally without ever signing it.