Lydia Faulkner

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

There is a schoolroom in the Faulkner memory that has no windows in it, only a long table, a horn-book, a candle stub, and a woman with a birch rod she never used. That was where Lydia Faulkner spent most of her working life, and it was the place where, as far as anyone can tell, she did the most good. Born in 1596 in Bolton, Lancashire, she died in 1651 of the plague, at the age of fifty-five, having never married, never taken up a stake and never once, in the family's estimation, wasted a minute. She was a spinster teacher, and if the phrase sounds narrow, the record of what she made of it is not. She was the younger daughter of William Faulkner, a saddler and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger known as The Thorn Tally, and Lydia Braithwaite, a dressmaker. Her sister Elyn, born the year before, was the one in whom the family's reputation for daring seemed to concentrate, and Lydia, growing up in the shadow of it, took the other path without resentment. Bolton was a market town on the edge of the moors, famous for its fustians, a coarse cloth of linen and cotton that had been made there since Flemish weavers settled in the district. The Croal ran through it, brown with dye and tannery waste, and the noise of hand-looms came out of the cottages from before dawn until the candles were snuffed. Her father died in 1607, when she was eleven, and with him went the workshop's income and the cheerful disorder of the house. Her mother took in sewing and taught Lydia to use a needle for money, but what Lydia wanted was to read. She had learned her letters at her father's bench, and she pursued them with a hunger that surprised the family: she borrowed a Psalter from the curate, memorised whole chapters of the Book of Common Prayer, and copied out her mother's pattern-lists in a round, even hand. By the time she was fifteen she was better at sums than the parish clerk and knew it. The grammar school in the town did not admit girls, so she made her own education out of borrowed books, and later she made schools for others. The death of her mother in 1616 fell in her twentieth year. Elyn, at twenty-one, took a position as housekeeper in Rochdale, and it was Lydia who decided to remain in Bolton and make her way as a teacher. She began in a single room, with four children whose parents could not afford the fee for a proper school, and by her mid-twenties she had a small dame-school of a dozen or so pupils of both sexes, in a room over a chandler's shop. She taught them the alphabet from the horn-book, then reading from the Bible and the primer, then plain writing, and for the girls needlework and household accounts, and for a few of the quicker ones the elements of figuring. The fees were paid in pence, in eggs, in firewood. It was not a grand establishment, but children from three streets could read after a winter with her, which in the Lancashire of that day was a rare thing. She was a small, upright woman, slightly stooped from years of bending over slates, with a pale, alert face and a voice that never rose. Her pupils remembered her patience and her stillness: she would wait for an answer for so long that the child, from sheer embarrassment, would find one. She dressed in dark stuff gowns with a white linen cap, was careful about washing her hands, and kept a jar of dried lavender in the schoolroom, which the pupils said made the whole place smell of Sundays. The family's other life was never hidden from her. Her father had been a hunter, and her sister Elyn became one in 1618, so Lydia knew the truth about the Red Ledger from childhood, and what she did with it was as much a part of the family's work as any stake. She kept Elyn's secrets, of course; she mended the cloak, cleaned the mud from the boots, and listened to the accounts of the previous night without comment. But she also used her schoolroom as an unexpected listening-post. Children talk, and what they say at a slate is sometimes what they have heard at home: a father who came back at dawn with his hands shaking, a neighbour who did not cast a shadow on a winter afternoon, a well in the next village gone bad. Lydia gathered these fragments patiently, and passed the ones that mattered to her sister, and later, when Elyn was gone, to the wider circle of the Lancastrian hunters, in letters written in her small clear hand. The great sorrow of her life came in 1632, when Elyn died in a churchyard from a blow she took there. Lydia, thirty-six, buried her sister and then, by the family's account, went back to the schoolroom the next morning and taught the alphabet to a class of eleven. She never said what it cost her. In the years after, she took to walking up onto the moor on Sundays alone, and it was noticed that she carried a stave, though she never used it against anything but brambles. She had not been called, and knew it, and made peace with the fact by a kind of deliberate stubbornness. The Faulkner tally would be kept by others; she would keep the record of what the town knew. She lived through the plague years and the hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, and then through the civil wars, which split the northern gentry and turned Lancashire into a country of siege and skirmish. Bolton itself became a byword: Prince Rupert's army stormed the town in May 1644 in a fight that was long remembered, and Lydia, then forty-eight, kept her schoolroom shut for weeks and her pupils' families fed on what she could find. She did not choose sides in public. She taught the children of royalists and Parliament men alike, and one of her more delicate accomplishments was to persuade both to send their sons and daughters, in the same room, to learn the same alphabet. When the plague returned to the district she stayed. It was 1651, and the sickness had come to the poorer streets of Bolton, and she went on teaching until the day the last of her pupils' parents kept them home. She died of it that summer, aged fifty-five. Nobody in the family recorded who nursed her, only that the schoolroom was found in order, the slates stacked, the candle stub in its dish. She left no husband and no children; what she left was a generation of readers, several of whom kept the family's letters for decades. In the wider Slayerverse she is remembered as the one Faulkner who never fought and never left the fight: a teacher whose lessons, in their way, held the line.