Lydia Whittier

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

Lydia Whittier was born in 1705 in Springfield, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River, and she came into the Faulkner story by way of a counter, a set of scales and a husband who fixed cartwheels. She was a shopkeeper by trade, and she married a vampire slayer without being one herself. The ledgers name her only in passing, as the wife of Denys Faulkner, but the fragments about her in family letters show a sharp, capable woman who ran the front of a business while the back of it dealt with harder matters. Springfield in her girlhood was a frontier town in all but name. It sat at the head of the river trade, with a meetinghouse, a fortified house or two left over from the Indian wars, and a busy landing where flatboats brought down flour, salt pork and furs and took back rum, molasses and iron. Queen Anne's War had ended only a few years after her birth, and older people still talked of the raid on Deerfield in 1704 as if it had happened the week before. Her family came from the ordinary middle of the town, the kind of household that owned a few acres and a good deal of debt, and nothing in the record suggests a particular reason for her to learn a trade; she learned one because the goods in the family store needed someone who could count. By fourteen she was minding it alone on market days, weighing out tea, pepper and nails, and could reckon in pounds, shillings and pence faster than her brothers could in their heads. The family lore, thin as it is, holds that she met Denys Faulkner over a broken axle. He was a wheelwright, born in 1702, who had come up the valley road with a wagon-load of his own timber to set up a shop near the landing, and he was also a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, though he said nothing of that at first. He bought nails on credit, paid them back exactly, and returned each Saturday for a week longer than nails required. Lydia was suspicious of him, and also plainly delighted. They married in 1722, when she was seventeen and he was twenty, in the Springfield meetinghouse, with a bare wedding dinner of boiled fowl and Indian pudding and a borrowed cart to carry her few possessions the length of the street. She made her own rules for the marriage. The shop was hers; she kept the books in a firm, upright hand and would not have him lean on the counter. The wheel-yard was his. Where the two overlapped, she made it her business to know as little about his nights as she could and no less than she needed to. It was she who worked out, within a season of their wedding, what his absences meant, and it was she who gave him an ultimatum the following winter: he would tell her the truth, once, in full, and then never lie to her about it again. He did. She was not afraid. What she felt, her daughter later wrote, was a kind of cold practical anger, and then a resolve to make the household safe. Their first child, Patience Faulkner, was born in 1724, and John Faulkner followed in 1727. Both grew up in rooms above the shop, with the smell of pitch and tallow and the ring of Denys's hammer, and both grew up, in a sense, in the ledger. Patience showed the calling and became a slayer; John did not, and turned instead to the trade side of the family, keeping accounts for others and eventually a small store of his own. Lydia raised the two of them as much by discipline as tenderness. Every child in the household could be trusted to hold the accounts of a night's work in strict silence, and to say, if a customer asked, only that Papa was away seeing a man about timber. The shop took up much of what Lydia gave the Faulkner work. Slayers of the 1720s and 1730s needed things that ordinary people bought without thinking: lead for shot, powder, rope, candles, salt, lamp oil, blessed and unblessed iron, and cloth for bandages. Lydia sold them in ways that never drew a second look, breaking large purchases into small ones and spreading them across weeks. She also kept a private book, apart from the shop accounts, in which she recorded what Denys and later Patience had used and what the Red Ledger could expect in the way of debts and repayments from cousins elsewhere in the colony. It was, in its own way, a second ledger, and was still in family hands a century afterward. The Faulkners' rivalry with the Proctors, whose White Ledger ran a parallel tally in the southern colonies, was a distant thing to her in Springfield, but she took it seriously as a matter of pride. She read the news of the Proctors' successes with an expression that the household learned to recognise, and she was not above pressing her husband to count a kill twice if it had been the work of two men. Denys, who was honest, refused. She thought he was too honest by half. The year 1742 brought her the great loss of her life: Denys died that year, at forty. The ledger entry gives few details, and Lydia herself never wrote them out. She kept the wheel-yard going for a season with a hired journeyman, then sold most of it, and concentrated on the shop and on her children. Patience, who by then had the calling and was working with a gun, needed a steady house to come home to; John needed a start. Lydia gave them both. She wore black for the requisite period and afterward wore a grey stuff gown that people in Springfield remembered as her uniform, and she did not marry again. She died in 1747 of a fever, aged forty-two, five years after her husband. It was a season of low, wet weather along the river and the sickness took several households on the same street. Her daughter Patience, who lived until 1784, closed the shop, and her son John, who lived until 1790, kept her books. The family's memory of Lydia Whittier is that of a woman who wanted the Faulkner tally to be as long as it could be, and who understood, better than the men who carried the rifles, how many hands were needed to put a single rifle on a road at night. Within the Slayerverse she is one of the household figures whose names appear in no ledger tally and whose work is present in every line of it.