Josiah Wrigley

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

The smell of hot tallow followed Josiah Wrigley through his whole life, and he came to like it. He was born in 1643 at Haslingden, a stone village in the Rossendale hills of Lancashire, where the wind came off the moors with rain in it eight days out of ten and the people made their living from sheep, coarse woollens and the quarrying of flagstones. His parents are not named in the family papers, and the little that is known of his childhood comes from remarks he made in later years, that the house was cold, the bread was dark, and the first candle he ever saw made was his mother's, poured into a mould of tin on a wet Sunday evening. The child stood watching the wick catch and decided, with a solemnity that his family teased him about for decades, that he would be the man who made light. Haslingden in the 1640s was a township under strain. The Civil War had passed through the county with pikes and cannon, and the clothiers of Rossendale, who supplied cloth to the armies of both sides, had felt the shock of its coming and going. Money was scarce, prices swung wildly, and the tallow ration of the poor household was measured out in inches of rushlight. Josiah grew up conscious of what light cost. A rushlight, a stalk of rush peeled and dipped in grease, gave a small, smoky, wavering glow and burned for barely half an hour, while a proper dip of mutton tallow gave a longer and steadier one, and a wax candle was a luxury for churches and gentlemen. He noticed all this early, along with the fact that a household that could afford more light could do more with its evening, and by the time he was fourteen he was bound apprentice to a chandler in the town. His master taught him the whole trade over seven years. He learned to buy fat from the butchers at the autumn slaughter, to render it in a great iron copper without letting it scorch, to strain it through cloth and to twist wicks of spun cotton to the right thickness, since a wick too thin drowned in its own grease and one too thick smoked and guttered. He learned to dip, lifting a frame of a dozen wicks out of the melted fat again and again until each candle grew fat and even, and to mould the better kinds in tin. He learned to make soap from tallow and wood ash, to sell it by the pound, and to keep the accounts of a shop where half the customers paid in credit. When he was free of his indentures he moved a few miles across the hills to Bolton, where the growing fustian trade needed light for its hand-loom workshops well into the evening, and rented a small shop near the market cross. He was a thickset, slow-spoken man, with a broad face and big careful hands that were always faintly greasy, and he was unusually mild in a trade full of hard bargainers. Customers said he gave good weight and never argued about a farthing, and his shop became a place where people came to stand for a minute out of the rain. He was Presbyterian in his leanings, disliked swearing and was fond of proverbs, and in the years after the Restoration he kept his head down, paid his tithes and said little about bishops. He did have one great curiosity, which was for the people who bought candles by the gross at odd hours, and in the winter of 1664 there was a young dressmaker from Churchgate who came to him three times in a fortnight for far more candles than any sewing could account for. That was Edith Faulkner. She had a way of asking for candles as if she wanted nothing else, and Josiah, who was no fool, reckoned quickly that a woman who bought a great deal of tallow and no wax, who paid in coin and did not haggle, and who came in just before dusk with an untroubled look, was going somewhere he had not been told about. It took him the better part of a year to ask. When he did, she told him, in a flat and careful voice, that she was a vampire slayer of the Faulkner house and that the candles lit her long nights of waiting in churchyards and empty barns. He said nothing for a while. Then he said that he would prefer to make her a better candle, one that would stand in a wind, and that if she was to be out at night he would like to know where. They were married in 1665, in the year the plague in London sent shivers up every road in England and the Bolton corporation put watchers at the town ends. It was a small wedding at the parish church, and it is recorded that Edith's father Abraham, the cooper and slayer they called The Amber Tally, gave him a hard, searching look and then shook his hand as one tradesman to another. Josiah moved into her rooms, then took a larger house near the shop, and began the strange double life of the husband of a hunter. He kept the shop, sold candles, soap and lamp oil, and gave credit to the poor at a rate that made his accounts miserable. He kept a dark lantern by the door and a stool by the window, and when Edith was out he sat up with a book he could not read at night without his own candles, and his own candles were the best in Bolton. He never asked to become a slayer and was never asked. He held horses, carried messages, sat with wounded men in the back room, and on two occasions, according to the family memory, stood at the mouth of a lane with a lantern in one hand and a candlestick in the other, ready to shout the alarm. He made what the hunters of the county called wind tapers, thin sticks of tallow and beeswax with a core of thickened wick that would burn steadily in a gale, and he made them cheap for those who needed them and expensive for gentlemen who did not. He also, when told, forgot things. His wife once said that Josiah had the finest memory in Lancashire for the things he had promised not to remember. Their children were Olive Wrigley, born in 1667, and James Wrigley Faulkner, born in 1669. He was a gentle father who gave both children sweets of boiled sugar at the end of the week and taught them their letters from the labels on his candle boxes. Olive turned out to be a slayer, which alarmed and delighted him in nearly equal parts, and he had a small stake made for her by a Bolton turner and hung a lantern in her window on the nights that she began to go out. James was not called, and Josiah put him to work in the shop, where he took to the accounts with a thoroughness that pleased his father. When the Glorious Revolution turned the kingdom upside down in 1688 and half the county wondered whether it would see civil war again, Josiah sold candles to both sides and said his prayers for peace. Edith's father died in 1685, and in the years afterwards Josiah took on more of the family's paperwork and more of its worries. He died in 1701, aged fifty-eight, of a fever that swept through Bolton that autumn and took several of his neighbours. He had taken a chill, refused to stop working, and went to bed on a Tuesday and was dead by Sunday. Edith sat with him through the last night, and the shop was closed for a week, which had never happened before. He was buried in the churchyard at Bolton, and Edith wore black for him for the rest of her life. The shop passed to the family, and the candles were made in the same copper for another generation. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the chandler who kept the lamp lit for a hunter, a man who never took a stake in his hand and yet had a place in the Faulkner memory beside those who did.