Katharine Faulkner

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

Katharine Faulkner was born in 1690 in Lancaster, Lancashire, in the shadow of the castle that had been the county gaol for as long as anyone could recall, and she lived to see the county emptied and refilled by three separate armies. Her mother Helen Faulkner, a weaver and the vampire slayer known as The Quiet Ford, died within weeks of her birth, and the child was the last thing Helen left. Katharine grew up to be a herbalist, a woman who knew what grew in the hedges between Lancaster and the Lune and what it would do, and who spent fifty-five years never marrying, never leaving Lancashire for long and never being anywhere she was not needed. Her father was Everard Clegg, a ferryman, and her older brother was Dennis Clegg, born in 1687, who was three when their mother died. The family had been at Padiham, up the Calder, but it was at Lancaster that Katharine was born, probably in the house of a Faulkner cousin to whom Helen had gone in the last months of her pregnancy. She was taken back to Everard's cottage on the river when she was a few weeks old and brought up by a succession of neighbour women and by her brother, who at three, as she used to say, had appointed himself her guardian and never entirely stopped. The surname she bore was her mother's and not her father's, which was unusual, and which reflected an old agreement between Everard and the Faulkner cousins that the girl should keep the family name, in the custom by which Faulkner surnames often passed through the women. The boy became a Clegg and the girl a Faulkner. The Lancashire of her childhood was a country of small markets and hand-looms, fustian and linen, stone bridges and slow rivers, and it was in the middle of this that she learned her trade. The physic garden was uncommon then and the apothecary in Lancaster was expensive, so ordinary people went to the herbwife. Katharine was apprenticed in her teens to an older woman, a widow who lived in a low house on the edge of Lancaster and who had a garden full of comfrey, feverfew, wormwood, betony, valerian and tansy, and who taught her what to gather at which phase of the moon, though Katharine later said the moon mattered less than the soil. She learned to distil and to dry, to make a poultice and a cordial, to set a bone in a pinch and to sit beside a dying person without speaking. She learned Culpeper's herbal almost by heart, though she thought it too confident, and added notes of her own in the margins in a small upright hand. In person she was known as tall and a little stooped from bending over beds and borders, with hands stained green to the wrist in summer and brown in autumn, and with a dry manner that made patients trust her at once. She spoke little, and when she did she seldom repeated herself. She was remembered as generous and unsentimental: she would give a remedy to a beggar and charge a squire double, and it was said in Lancaster that no one had ever seen her surprised. She also kept, in a locked box under her bed, a few things from her mother: a small tally book, a length of silver wire, a copy of a list of names. Her brother Dennis had never asked to see them, but Katharine had, and she understood from an early age that the Faulkners of Lancaster, who had kept the Red Ledger for two and a half centuries, regarded her as one of their own, though she was not a slayer and never sought to become one. Her service to the family was in a different register. When a hunter returned from a night's work with a wound that would not close, or with a strange chill that no fire could reach, or with a burn from silver poorly handled, it was Katharine to whom the Lancaster cousins brought them. She knew that certain plants, wolfsbane among them, had a bad reputation and a worse reality, and she knew how to draw out the sickness that followed a bite that had not fully taken. Over decades she treated a dozen or more slayers, some of them from as far as Yorkshire, and the White Ledger's compilers, who rarely gave the Faulkners credit for anything, once acknowledged in a marginal line that the Lancaster herbwife had returned a Proctor cousin to his family in one piece. The Faulkners cherished that line and Katharine, when it was shown to her, merely remarked that the man had been a poor patient. Her brother Dennis remained her closest tie. He kept the farm near Padiham and she lived in Lancaster, and they wrote to each other and met at the great fairs. When the first Jacobite rising came in 1715, with a rebel army occupying Lancaster in November and marching on to Preston, she was twenty-five and living in the middle of it. The town was full of soldiers, Highlanders and English Catholic gentlemen, and after Preston the prisoners were marched back through the streets in shackles. She spent that winter treating wounds in the back rooms of houses where no one could afford a surgeon, in the belief that a man on the ground was a man whatever his cause. She lost her brother in 1726, when a fever took him at Padiham, and she nursed him through it and then buried him beside their mother. In her later decades she grew a little famous locally and a little feared. It was said in the market that Kate Faulkner could tell from a cough what was wrong with a house, and that she knew when a house was wrong in other ways. She turned away a doctor who had wanted to buy her recipes. She took an apprentice, an orphan girl, and taught her the trade, though the ledgers do not name the girl, and the wiki cannot invent her. She remained unmarried and had no children, and the household she kept was small: two rooms, a cat, a still and a garden that in summer resembled a small forest. The second Jacobite rising came in the winter of 1745, when Prince Charles Edward Stuart's army marched south through Lancashire, through Preston and Manchester and on toward Derby, and returned in retreat through the same country a few weeks later, leaving the roads churned and the villages stripped. She was fifty-five. She spent that winter in the same way she had spent the first rising thirty years earlier, going from door to door with her basket. She caught a fever from a household of Highland stragglers that she had gone to tend and died of it in 1745, in the house in Lancaster where she had lived so long, only days after the last of the Prince's soldiers had left the county. The Red Ledger's Lancaster cousins buried her in the churchyard of the priory church beside the castle, and the family preserved her notebooks of remedies, which were used by a later generation. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the healer of the Lancastrian side, an unmarried herbalist who never took a rifle in her hand and who, in the long contest of tallies and reputations between the two ledgers, kept more hunters alive than most of the names written in them.