Mercy Faulkner Ingersoll

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

The house on Essex Street where Mercy Faulkner Ingersoll took in lodgers was never quiet, and she seems to have liked it that way. She was born in 1763 at Salem Town, Massachusetts, the first child of Isaac Ingersoll and Charity Cooke, though the family lived out at the edge of the township on a working farm rather than among the counting houses of the harbour. Isaac Ingersoll, born in 1740, was a farmer of the plain, stubborn kind, with rocky pasture, a few cows and a stand of apple trees, and Charity Cooke, born the same year, was a farmer's wife who churned, salted, spun and raised poultry, and who kept a Bible and an almanac on the same shelf and consulted both. Mercy carried the Faulkner name in an unusual way. In her family the surname passed down through daughters as often as through sons, and her Ingersoll parentage, which appears in her married-sounding style, sat alongside the older name that the family ledgers used for the line. Salem in the 1760s was a place of tar, salt cod and molasses, of wharves and rope-walks and merchants who were rapidly growing rich on the West Indies trade. A farm girl who came into the town on market days saw ships from Lisbon and Barbados unloading, heard the shouted arguments over freight and insurance, and learned that the world was much larger than the fields. She was also a child of the old faith of the Puritan settlements, taken to meeting twice on Sundays, made to memorise the catechism and reminded regularly of the witch trials that the town had never quite lived down. Mercy grew up amused rather than frightened by that history. She remarked in later life that anyone who had really wanted to catch a devil in Salem would have looked in the taverns on Derby Wharf rather than in the parlours of old women, and that the town's great mistake had been to hunt the wrong people with the right amount of noise. Her younger brother Hezekiah followed her a year later, born in 1764, and the two of them grew up in the closest partnership of children on an isolated farm, working the same rows, climbing the same rocks and sharing a bed in the loft until they were too old to allow it. Mercy was the manager and he was the follower, and this pattern held for the rest of their lives. Their father Isaac died in 1785, when she was twenty-two, and their mother Charity outlived him by twenty years, dying in 1805. Between those two dates the farm was sold, and Mercy, unmarried and practical, did what a good many single women of her generation did with a small inheritance and a good head for figures: she took a lease on a tall, narrow house near the harbour and began to keep boarders. A boarding house in the years after the Revolution was a shrewd business for a woman on her own. The town was crowded with sailors between voyages, ships' carpenters, clerks, itinerant schoolmasters, widows waiting on pensions and travelling men who did not care to pay a tavern's prices. Mercy served breakfast at six and supper at half past six, charged by the week in Massachusetts paper and hard money as it came, set a good table of salt fish, chowder, brown bread, baked beans on Saturday and a pudding on Sunday, and was known along the street for refusing credit to anyone who had already been refused once. She was said to be a small woman with a firm mouth and very quick eyes, who wore a plain cap and a large apron and could tell from the sound of a boot on the stair whether the lodger belonging to it was sober. She was also, in her way, kind. More than one young sailor down on his luck found a bed in her attic on the understanding that he would repay her when he sailed, and most of them did. She was not a slayer, and it would be wrong to say she was ever called. The Ingersoll and Faulkner families had slayers in them, and the Red Ledger, that book of vampires taken by the Lancastrian side since the Wars of the Roses, was part of the family's private inheritance, but Mercy's contribution ran in another direction. A boarding house is an excellent listening post. Travellers talk at the supper table, and a landlady who says little and pours the tea hears which ships came in short-handed, which captain lost half his crew on a passage and would not say why, which lodger never took a meal in daylight and which one left a room in the morning with the bed unslept and the window latched from the inside. Mercy kept a small notebook in the pocket of her apron, in which she wrote such things in a shorthand of her own, and when a Faulkner hunter passed through Salem on the trail of something, a message was left with her and she had a list ready. She let rooms to them on the quiet, allowed a rifle to be cleaned in her kitchen after the others had gone to bed, and saw to it that a wounded man was fed and hidden without questions being asked. The family never entered her in the ledger as a hunter because she had never hunted. They wrote her down in the margins as a steadfast friend of the houses. The rivalry with the Proctors touched her in a modest way, as it touched most Faulkners who lived close to the harbours. Salem's ships carried people and news south to Philadelphia and the Chesapeake, and it was through her lodgers that she learned to recognise the sort of traveller who was in truth a Proctor correspondent, a quiet clerk who was too interested in who else had rooms in the house, or a factor who asked after certain sea captains by name. She treated them exactly as she treated everyone else, with the same broth and the same bill, and was heard to say that a Proctor's money spent as well as a Faulkner's. Such courtesy was an old custom of the two houses, whose contest was one of tallies and reputations rather than violence, and it suited her temperament. She was fond of pointing out that, in three hundred years of accusation over the escape of the vampire the ledgers call the Guest at Towton in 1461, neither family had yet produced a single fact that would convince the other. Mercy never married. It was the fashion of the town to remark on this, and she is reported to have answered that she already kept a house full of men and had no wish to keep another. Her brother Hezekiah, who by then drove a team between Andover and the coast, lodged with her when his work brought him to Salem, and she looked after him as she looked after the others, with rather more scolding. He fell ill in 1811 with the wasting illness that eventually took him, and Mercy travelled to Andover to nurse him for the better part of that summer, leaving the boarding house in the hands of a hired girl and her own long-serving cook. He died that year, aged forty-seven. She said very little at the funeral, but her cook noted that she took to sitting up late in the kitchen with the accounts, and that she did not raise the price of board that winter although it was the third bad one running. The final years of her life were troubled by the war and by the collapse of Salem's trade. The Embargo of 1807 emptied the wharves, and the war that began in 1812 laid up half the ships in the harbour and sent the privateers out in their place. Rooms that had once been let by the week now stood empty for months, and Mercy took in privateersmen, prize crews and the families of men who had not come back. She held the house together with the same brisk economy that she had always shown. She caught a fever in the spring of 1815, in the last weeks before the news of peace reached Massachusetts, and died of it that year at the age of fifty-two. She left neither husband nor children, so the boarding house passed to a cousin, and its books, together with her shorthand notebooks, were carried to the Faulkner chest in Springfield, where a later hand added a line to the margin of the Red Ledger recording her service. In the family's memory she stands as the landlady who kept the lamp burning. The Faulkners of the following generation liked to say that a hunter could sleep in Salem on the strength of one name, and Mercy's was that name. Her place in the Slayerverse is a modest and thoroughly human one: she was a Faulkner of Massachusetts who, without ever lifting a rifle, gave the hunters of her house a roof, a table and a well-kept confidence, and who ran a scrupulously honest business for thirty years in a town that had learned to be afraid of the wrong things.