Jane Nowell was born in 1617 in Garstang, Lancashire, a small market town on the Wyre where the road north from Preston crossed the river and where, on Thursdays, farmers from the Fylde brought butter, cheese and hens to sell under the market cross. She was the daughter of no one the family records name, and that anonymity is the first fact about her: she arrived in the Faulkner story with no house, no ledger, and no famous ancestors, only a good head for figures and a habit of getting up before everyone else.
Her girlhood was passed above and behind a shop. The family trade, as far as anyone recalls, was in groceries and small wares, the shelves stacked with raisins, sugar loaf, pepper, candles and soap, and the young Jane learned to weigh, to bargain and to remember what each customer owed. Garstang in the years after King James was a plain, decent place of low brick and stone cottages with thatched or slate roofs, a church that stood a little apart from the town, and a great deal of mud. Wet weather ran off the Bowland fells and flooded the low meadows, and the year turned on the fairs and the cattle market. Jane went to church, learned her Bible and her catechism and, unusually for a shopkeeper's daughter, learned to write a fair hand, because her father had come to trust her with the day-book.
In 1637 she married Ivo Faulkner. He was four years younger than she was, born in 1621 at Padiham, and though only sixteen at the wedding he was already a yeoman's son with a small holding of his own, come into a little land through his late father's will. It was an unequal-looking match, the elder shopkeeper's daughter and the younger farmer, but the Nowell shop and the Faulkner acres each had what the other lacked, and the two young people had been thrown together by trade. Ivo came to Garstang selling oats and came away with a wife. The family accounts do not say how long the courtship lasted, but Jane apparently made up her mind at the third market day.
The Faulkners were the Red Ledger's people, though Jane, marrying into them, did not know it. It was the custom of that house to tell a bride what she needed to know in stages, and the first stage was that the family had enemies in Yorkshire who were also, curiously, cousins. Jane's own stage arrived one night in the first winter of the marriage, when she woke to find Ivo's mother's brother at the kitchen table with a hawthorn stake and a pistol, sharpening the one and cleaning the other while the household slept. She said nothing then, or afterwards, but the next morning she moved the flour bin to stand against the cellar door and never explained why. In the Faulkner memory she is credited with taking the whole affair as a matter of housekeeping.
Their daughters came quickly. Jane Faulkner was born in 1640, named for her mother, and Mercy Faulkner followed in 1641. Neither girl was a slayer, and Jane, the mother, was content that they should not be. She kept the household in the kind of order that let others do the difficult things: she ran the shop counter, which she had inherited from her father in effect if not in law, kept the family's money separate from the household's, and was known throughout the neighbourhood as a person who gave short weight to nobody and long credit to anyone genuinely in need. The shop became, unofficially, a listening post. Farmers, carriers and drovers told a shopkeeper's wife things they would not tell a constable, and Jane sorted what was gossip from what was warning and passed the latter to her husband and to the cousins.
The civil wars split Lancashire, and they split it along lines that ran through the market. The Earl of Derby's men bought cloth on one side of the street and the Parliament men bought powder on the other, and Jane sold to both, on the principle that a shop that took sides would be burned by the other. Soldiers were quartered in the district in 1643 and again in 1648, when the Scots came south, and she got her daughters through both by hiding them in the cheese loft and the flour, and once, according to the ledger, by feeding a whole troop of hungry Roundheads on porridge and telling them the beef was for the wounded. The family's fortunes did not rise but they did not fall, which in that decade was a kind of victory.
Jane's dealings with the vampire hunters were practical. She kept the salt, and the rowan and hawthorn twigs that the family hung over the thresholds, and saw to it that the children never stayed out on the dark side of the hedge. When a wandering stranger came to the shop asking for a room and refusing all offers of hot food, she sent for Ivo before she let him cross the doorstep. She was never afraid, or if she was, she did not show it, and the girls learned from her that there is no special virtue in noise.
The Nowells left few records, but there is a bundle of Jane's own account slips among the Red Ledger's papers, tied with green thread, which shows that she entered every hunt that passed through the house in the margins of her household ledger, in her own code of weights and measures, so that a pound of tallow meant a wound dressed, an ounce of pepper meant a sighting and a bolt of white linen meant a death. It is from her marginal arithmetic that the modern family reconstructs a good part of the Lancashire tally of the 1640s and 1650s.
She died in 1659, of a winter cough, at the age of forty-two, after a January in which the frost lay on the fells for six weeks. It began as a tickle and became a fever, and there was little then to be done for it beyond hot broth and prayer. Ivo, who lived on to 1684 and never remarried, buried her in the churchyard at Garstang and afterwards refused to let anyone move the counter in the shop from the place where she had stood. Their daughters carried the household on: Jane Faulkner lived until 1692, Mercy Faulkner until 1693.
In the Slayerverse Jane Nowell is remembered less as a hunter than as the shopkeeper's wife who made a hunting family's life possible, the outsider who married in, understood at once, and kept the accounts straight while everyone else fought. Faulkner tradition holds that her weights were never once found false, and that this alone was thought remarkable in a Lancashire market town of her day.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
