Mary Faulkner taught girls to spin for a living, which in the Lancashire of her day made her a spinster teacher in the plainest sense of the phrase, even though she was a wife and a mother for most of her adult life. She was born in 1608 at Bolton, a market town on the Croal at the edge of the moors, whose Saturday fair drew weavers, cottagers and farmers down from the hills and whose lanes were loud with the clatter of hand-looms and the slap of fustian being beaten out. Her father, Edward Stansfield, born in 1586, was a smith who kept a forge on the Deansgate side and shod horses for the carriers who came and went by the road to Manchester and Preston; her mother, Margery Thwaites, born in 1585, was a weaver who worked a loom in the room over the forge and sold her cloth by the piece. She carried the Faulkner name by the family's old custom of passing the surname through daughters, and she grew up hearing it spoken in the low tone reserved for things that mattered.
The forge was a warm, noisy, dangerous place in which to raise a child, and Mary was a solid, rough-handed girl who liked it. She carried coal, pumped the bellows and learned the names of the tools before she learned her letters. A little brother, Abraham Faulkner, born in 1611, followed her about with his thumb in his mouth. Their father died in 1625, when Mary was seventeen, of a fever that swept the town after a wet summer, and the forge passed to a journeyman. Their mother, Margery, kept the family alive at the loom and lived until 1651, long enough to see both of her children become hunters and one of them a grandmother. The children were taught at home what a good church-going Lancashire family taught, which was scripture, the catechism, and how to stand up to a landlord.
It was probably Margery who found her the place as a teacher. Bolton and its neighbours were full of small dame schools, kept in a cottage front room by any respectable woman who could read and spin, in which girls of the labouring and tradesmen's families were taught their letters from a horn-book and their trade from a wheel. Mary took a dozen pupils and taught them to card and to spin wool and flax into even, strong thread, the raw material of every loom in the district. The girls were paid in pennies and in eggs. She was strict, plain-spoken, generous with praise when it was due and unsparing when it was not, and she had a way of rapping the knuckles of a careless pupil with a wooden spindle that earned her the name by which the parish came to know her: The Rough Spindle. It was meant as a joke, and it fitted so well that the Red Ledger adopted it as her alias.
She married in 1627, at nineteen, Alexander Chaloner, a chandler of Haslingden, a Lancashire hill town up the valley from Bolton. He was two years older than she, a quiet, tallow-scented man with a talent for keeping accounts and a very high tolerance for his wife's absences. Their courtship was conducted largely over the counter of his shop, where she came to buy rushlights for her school, and they married with a cheerful lack of ceremony in the parish church. They settled in a stone cottage on the Bolton side of the hill, where he kept a shop and she her school, and where a year or two later she put her spindle down for a fortnight to give birth to their only child, Quenild Chaloner, born in 1629, a bright and inquisitive girl who was said to have inherited her mother's temper and her father's head for figures.
The calling, the moment that made her a vampire slayer, came to Mary in 1634, when she was twenty-six, at a crossroads. She was walking home from Bolton in the late afternoon, a hard, grey October day, when she came upon a tinker's cart stopped at the crossing. The horse stood in the shafts, blowing gently, and when she laid a hand on its flank it was still warm. The tinker lay in the ditch beside the road with his pots scattered around him, his throat opened and his body drained pale. It would not have taken a great imagination to see what had been done, but it took a hunter to see what had done it, and Mary saw, in the same instant, the marks in the mud leading away toward the marsh and understood that she was going to follow them. She did not, that evening. She waited, watched the crossroads for three nights, and on the fourth found what she had come for. In the ledger it is recorded as her first taking, and the record says that it was done with a stake made from a hawthorn hedge she had cut on the way.
That hedge was the beginning of her craft. Hawthorn Craft, as the Faulkners named it, was the art of choosing, cutting, seasoning and shaping the hawthorn stake so that it held its point and would not split when it struck bone. It was, among the Lancashire Faulkners, a recognised skill, and Mary became its finest practitioner. She could tell by the bark and the thorn spacing which hedges gave the hardest wood, and she went out in the right months to cut, dried the shafts in the rafters of her schoolroom, where a bundle of them, tied with tarred cord, hung among the spindles, and shaped them with a drawknife at her kitchen table. Her pupils thought the stakes were curtain rods. She carried them, with a flintlock pistol, in a long canvas roll under her cloak, and she was never once known to break one.
Her brother Abraham took the calling too, a few years after her, and the two of them hunted together across the moors and mosses of southern Lancashire for over a decade, she at the crossroads and the marshes, he in the towns. They had a familiar way of working, which was to argue the whole way to the place and say nothing at all once they were there. Their tallies in the Red Ledger, entered in adjacent columns, were in friendly rivalry with one another and, in the family's telling, with the Proctors, whose hunters Mary had opinions about without ever having met one. Alexander, her husband, is said to have kept the cottage's candles burning through the night whenever she was out, using stock he could ill afford, and to have taught his young daughter that a lit window was a form of prayer.
The civil wars fell across Mary's middle years, and Bolton's part in them was harsh. The town was a Parliamentary stronghold, taken by Prince Rupert's forces in 1644 in an assault so violent that the name of Bolton was remembered for a generation, and her school had to close for a season while the soldiery quartered themselves in the streets. She kept her stakes hidden in the roof. She hunted through it all, on the principle, which she repeated to her brother, that the dead had no political opinions. Her daughter Quenild grew up in those years, and Mary is remembered as a somewhat alarming parent: loving, but strict, and unwilling to explain herself. The girl was told the truth of her mother's business at fifteen, and took it, by her own account, with relief.
In the autumn of 1656, Mary went out to the marsh on a long night that began at dusk and ended after the church clocks struck five. What she found there was one of the last of a nest that she and Abraham had been working at for the whole season. She finished it. She walked home in the dawn, wet to the thighs, took a chill, and never recovered her strength. She died a few days later, at forty-eight. Her husband Alexander survived her by nine years. The Red Ledger's closing note for her is short, and says only that the Rough Spindle had turned her last thread. In the Slayerverse she is honoured as the teacher who made hunters of hedges, and a bundle of her hawthorn stakes, tied with tarred cord, hangs in the Faulkner collection among the spindles of her schoolroom.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
