Lillian Nichols

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

Lillian Nichols was born in 1839 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and lived fifty years as a boarding-house keeper on Orne Street and Front Street, in the crooked fishing town on the granite neck north of Salem. She married the carpenter and vampire slayer Elias Jewett Faulkner in 1864, had no children, buried him the following year, and kept his name and his memory, and a spare room with a lamp in it, for the twenty-four years that she survived him. She died in 1889 of kidney failure, aged fifty. She was not a hunter, and was not born to the Faulkner line, and her marriage lasted, by the family's reckoning, about fourteen months, most of which her husband spent in Virginia. But she was for a quarter of a century the landlady of the Red Ledger's Marblehead cousins, the woman who kept the plates warm and the door on the latch, and the family remembers her as the widow who would not leave the house, the one person in the town who could be relied on to be at home. She was born above her mother's kitchen, in a frame house on Orne Street that smelled of salt cod and boiled cabbage, the youngest of four. Her father Josiah Nichols fished the Grand Banks in a schooner out of the harbour, like every man on the street, and was at sea for most of each year, and her mother, Hannah, a square, weatherbeaten woman with a voice like a foghorn, kept the house and took in lodgers, who were mostly fishermen between voyages and shoe-binders from the new shops on the hill. Lillian grew up among strangers. She was a small, brown, silent child with a crooked front tooth, who carried trays, blacked boots and kept a great many secrets about what people said over breakfast, and was said by the age of ten to be the only person in the household who could make the old cat come when it was called. The gale of October 1846 was the great event of her girlhood. A sudden northeaster caught the Marblehead fleet off the Banks, and sixty-five men of the town were lost in a single night, leaving behind, it was said, some ninety children without fathers. Her father was one of them. She was seven. She remembered the bell, and the women on the wharves with shawls over their heads, and the silence of the street the next morning, and she remembered her mother, who had been left with a debt and a house full of lodgers, going into the kitchen at five, lighting the stove and cooking breakfast for nine. She said afterward that she had learned that day what a household was for. It was for continuing. She was put to work in earnest and did it well. At twelve she was running the dining room, and at sixteen she was keeping the accounts, in a slanting, honest hand, and dealing with the butcher, the grocer and the water-carrier with a flat, expressionless firmness that had the tradesmen of Front Street looking over their shoulders. Her mother, who was growing tired, leaned on her. She was a good manager. She liked her lodgers, who were easy, and disliked a mess, which was not. She had a gift for the fortune of the house. A guest who paid on Friday, she said, was a good guest, and a guest who paid on Monday was a bad one, and she could tell on the first night which it would be. She met Elias Jewett Faulkner in the spring of 1863, at the church supper of the Second Congregational, where he had come with his mother, the seamstress Anna Faulkner, who had lived in the town for twenty-eight years. He was twenty-two, a lean, brown-haired young carpenter with a scar on his thumb and a habit of looking at the exits of a room, who had been working that season on the roof of the fish house and who had, she thought, the steadiest pair of hands she had ever seen. She had been put at the pie table. He stood for a long time in front of it, looking at the pies, and then, very gravely, asked her which of them was the safest. She said that they were all about the same, but that the apple had been made by her mother. He took the apple. It was the first of a great many conversations that consisted of his asking a question and of her giving the exact and surprising answer. She was told what he was in the autumn of that year, a week before he left. He had been called in the summer, in a field of Ipswich, and he told her at the kitchen table, in the evening, after the lodgers had gone to bed, in a low voice, without looking up. It took him a quarter of an hour, and at the end he said that he would understand if she did not want to see him again. She said that she had supposed there was something. She had noticed that he always sat with his back to the wall, and that he did not drink, and that the lodgers who came to him at the back door were not carpenters. She said that she was not a person who expected her husband to be ordinary, since she had never known any man who was. He said that he had not asked her. She said that he would. They were married in 1864, in February, on a ten-day furlough, in the front room of the Orne Street house, with his mother, his sister Abigail and his brother-in-law Joseph Knight, who had come down from Newburyport with a bundle of printed cards and a bottle of cordial. It was a short, cold, very plain wedding. The groom was in uniform, with a dark scarf that hid the collar. The bride wore a grey dress that she had made herself and, at his mother's insistence, a hat that Abigail had made for the occasion, which she said was a great deal too fine for her. She wore it anyway. They had the wedding breakfast in the dining room, with the lodgers, who believed that it was an ordinary marriage, and they had five nights together. Then he went back to Virginia. She spent the next year on the kitchen stove. She kept the house through the spring and summer, as she always had, with the cat, the lodgers and a mortgage, and she read the letters from her husband at night, in a hand that was a great deal neater than his talk, and in a cipher of his own devising. It was, for a wife, a curious correspondence. It told her very little about the war and a great deal about the weather, the birds, the state of a particular road and the colour of the river. She took some time to understand that these were reports, and that she was the last person on the list to whom they were sent. Anna Faulkner explained it to her on a visit. She said that it was his way of telling her that he was alive. The wound came in the last weeks of the war, at a river crossing in Virginia, where he had been sent ahead of his regiment to watch the far bank. The details were never told her. She knew only that he was carried back on a stretcher, in April, to a hospital at Washington, and that in May a cousin of the Ledger met him there and brought him home by train, with a blanket over his knees. He was put into the spare room on the ground floor of the house on Orne Street, in the bed that she had made up for him, and she nursed him for the rest of the summer and into the autumn. The wound never closed. It was a deep, dark, sullen thing that would scab over and open again, and the doctors, to whom she was not allowed to tell all she knew, said that it would take time. She sat by him at night with a lamp. He was a good patient, silent and dry, and was often awake. He told her, in the last weeks, in a low voice, what the country had looked like from the far bank of the river. He died in November 1865, at twenty-four, in the evening, with the lamp lit. She sat with the body until morning. She was twenty-six. It was a little over a year since the wedding, and she was a widow, in a house with seven lodgers, and she went downstairs at five and lit the stove. It was said by the neighbours that she did not cry until the spring, and then did it all in one afternoon, in the pantry, with the door shut. After that she was the same as before, only more so. She did not marry again. The house on Orne Street, which had been her mother's, became hers in 1870, and she ran it for nineteen years, with a widow's cap and a widow's pension and a particular way of saying the word Faulkner. The Ledger's North Shore cousins came and went. She kept the back bedroom, with its separate stair, for their use, and the kitchen table, at which a tired hunter could eat at four in the morning, and she kept, in a drawer in the kitchen, a ledger of her own, in which she wrote the names of those who had come in, without comment. Anna Faulkner, her mother-in-law, lived three streets away, and the two of them took supper together every Sunday for twenty-two years, in a silence that was not at all uncomfortable. After Abigail's death in 1886 she took in the two granddaughters, Abigail Knight and Alice Faulkner, for a winter, and fed them, and told them that their mother had been the best milliner on the coast and a person whom nobody was going to replace. When Anna died in 1887, after a fall on the wharf steps, it was Lillian who reached her first, by the light at the end of the pier that Anna had gone down to see lit. She died in the autumn of 1889, of kidney failure, at fifty, in her own bed, in the house where she had been born. The lodgers, who had been given notice by a doctor that it could not be long, came in a line, with their hats in their hands. She had kept, in the pocket of her apron, a small piece of dark carpenter's pencil. It was found, after her death, and buried with her. Lillian Nichols is remembered in the Faulkner family as the landlady of Marblehead, the widow who kept the light and the stove. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the Red Ledger's waiting houses, the wives who never went out with the hunters and who were nonetheless the only ones to be there when they came back.