Lydia Braithwaite

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

Lydia Braithwaite was born in 1573 in Lancaster, Lancashire, in the reign of Elizabeth, and spent the whole of her forty-three years within a day's walk of the town's grey castle and the river Lune. She married into the Faulkner family, the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, but she never carried a stake, never wrote a line in the ledger and, as far as any surviving page shows, never asked to. What she did was keep a household standing while her husband and later her elder daughter went out after dark, and the family remembered her as the person who made the hunting possible in the unglamorous way that cloth, thread and a shut door make things possible. Lancaster in her childhood was a compact, hilly town of slate roofs, cobbled lanes and the steep pull of Castle Hill, with the priory church above it and the quay below where small vessels brought in Irish linen, Baltic timber and, now and then, a cargo of salt. Beyond the walls lay the wool farms, the old abbey lands that had passed to lay owners after the dissolution, and the stone-walled moors where sheep were gathered in the autumn. Her father's trade is not recorded, but the Braithwaites appear in the parish books as ordinary tradespeople of no great means, and Lydia was put to sewing early, as most girls of her station were. She learned to cut from a pattern held in the head rather than on paper, to set a sleeve so that it hung without a wrinkle, and to stitch a buttonhole small enough that a customer would not notice it. By her middle teens she was working for a dressmaker near the market cross, and she was already known for a light hand with a needle and a sharp tongue about the price of thread. The trade she followed was more varied than the name suggests. A dressmaker of the 1590s in a northern town made bodices, kirtles, sleeves and petticoats for merchants' wives and the daughters of lesser gentry, and she also mended, turned old gowns inside out for a second life, and lined winter cloaks with rabbit or coney. Lydia kept a boxwood measuring rod, a heavy pair of shears that she would let nobody else touch, and a tin of pins that she counted at the end of each day. She dealt in fustian, russet and linsey-woolsey more often than in silk, and she liked to say that a plain wool skirt cut well would outlast a silk one cut badly. Her customers found her honest and a little forbidding, and the ones who stayed with her stayed for decades. She met William Faulkner, a saddler, when he came to the shop to ask whether she could sew a scrap of good leather onto a pair of gloves for his mother. William was seventeen years old when she was twenty, and the difference in ages was a matter for some teasing among the town's gossips. He was a quiet young man from the edge of Pendle Forest, with the callused fingers of someone who spent his days with an awl and waxed thread, and he came back to the shop four times that spring with tasks that could not conceivably have needed her. They were married in 1593 in Lancaster, when she was twenty and he was seventeen, and the two trades were joined in a narrow house with a workroom on the ground floor, where leather hung on one wall and folded cloth sat on the other. Neighbours claimed the room smelled of tallow, oak bark and lavender in equal parts. It took Lydia a little time to understand what her husband's family truly did. The Faulkners were a hunting house, and the Red Ledger, begun by Hugh Faulkner in 1455 during the Wars of the Roses, recorded the vampires taken by the Lancastrian side and the honour that went with each entry. William's mother, Iona Thorne, came out of a border-reiver house that had settled in Lancashire, and William's father, Ralph Faulkner, was a forester who walked the edge of Pendle with a lantern. Lydia was told in the first year of her marriage, over a supper that nobody finished, and she took it in silence and then asked practical questions. Where would the blood be washed out? Who would sew the pockets into the coats that carried hawthorn stakes? By the end of that week she had cut a heavy canvas jerkin for her brother-in-law with a hidden sleeve for a stake and had stitched a strip of red wool inside the collar, a small private mark that the family copied for generations. Their children arrived quickly. Elyn Faulkner was born in 1595 and Lydia Faulkner in 1596, and the house grew loud and crowded. Lydia the elder raised both girls at the workbench, teaching them to thread a needle before they could read, and she kept a strict rule that no matter how late the hunting ran, the shutters were latched and a lamp left burning at the window. Elyn, quick, watchful and inclined to sit with her back to a wall, would in time take up the family craft and become a vampire slayer in her own right. Her sister Lydia was the settled, practical one, and never took the calling. Their mother made no secret that she was grateful for the one and reconciled to the other, and she told both girls that a household needs somebody who can be relied upon to stay alive. The early Stuart years pressed hard on the town. Plague came to Lancashire in the first years of the new century, and in 1603 and after, the parish register filled with burials in a way that even a hardened churchwarden found grim. There were winters when the Lune froze at its edges and the price of oatmeal climbed until the poor could not buy it, and Lydia sold her spare cloth at cost to families who had none to spare. William was called to the hunt in 1604, after a fever broke in a sickroom and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed, and from then on Lydia understood her marriage differently: she was no longer the wife of a man who occasionally disappeared on family business but the wife of a slayer, which was a more exposed and more dignified position. She mended his coats as before, and she added a second lining of oiled linen against the damp. William died in 1607, thrown from a horse on a wet road at the age of thirty-one, and in the same year his mother Iona Thorne died as well. Lydia was thirty-four, with two daughters aged eleven and twelve, a workroom, a stock of leather she did not know how to sell and a family that had lost two of its best hunters in a single season. It is to her credit that the house did not fold. She kept the sewing going, took in two apprentices, and let the leather be sold on to a saddler in Preston who paid a fair price. The Faulkner cousins looked in on her, and Nicholas Faulkner in particular mended shutters and brought firewood in the years that followed. She never remarried, and she never allowed anyone to speak of her as a woman left behind. She spent her final nine years as the fixed point that the family orbited. Elyn ran errands for the hunters, and later hunted herself; Lydia the younger learned every stitch her mother knew. Visitors to the house remarked on its order and its quiet, and on a mother who could recite the price of a yard of kersey in three neighbouring towns. Lydia Braithwaite died in 1616 of old age, at forty-three, which in her generation and her trade was considered a full and worn-out life. The Red Ledger has no entry under her name, since it recorded only the taken, but a margin note in a later hand describes her as the seamstress who kept the house dry and the lamp lit. In the wider history of the Slayerverse she stands for the Faulkners who did the necessary work beside the hunting and were remembered for it in the family's own quieter accounts.