Mercy Faulkner

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

Mercy Faulkner was born in 1641 in the Quinsigamond country of Massachusetts Bay, the Nipmuc hill land in the middle of the colony that would later be known as Worcester, though in her infancy it was little more than a trading path and a few English claims. Her father, Ivo Faulkner, was a yeoman from Padiham in Lancashire who had crossed the Atlantic with his wife, Jane Nowell, in the early years of the Great Migration, when the Puritan colonies were filling up with English farmers and tradesmen who had no love for Archbishop Laud. He left an elder daughter, Jane Faulkner, born in 1640, behind with a widowed aunt, meaning to send for her when the household was settled. That plan lasted longer than anyone intended. Mercy grew up as the only daughter in the house, with a sister she knew from letters and a mother who spoke of Lancashire with a tightness in her voice. The family did not stay long on the rim of the country. By the middle of the 1640s Ivo had moved down to the new town of Haverhill on the Merrimack River, where the General Court had granted land for planting and where a meeting-house went up before the barns. Mercy's childhood was the ordinary childhood of a Puritan girl. She was catechised before she could read, learned her letters from a hornbook, spun flax on a great wheel in the loft from the age of seven, and sat through two long Sunday sermons on a plank bench with the girls, hearing the minister expound the doom of the wicked. The house was a low timber frame with a stone chimney, open to the smell of woodsmoke and salt cod, and the cold in January was such that the ink froze in the standish. Her mother, who was gentle and stubborn in equal parts, died in 1659, when Mercy was eighteen, and the girl kept house for her father from then on. Ivo Faulkner belonged to the Lancastrian family that kept the Red Ledger, though like many of the cadet branches he had brought little more than its story across the ocean. He told Mercy the tale of Hugh Faulkner and the Wars of the Roses, of the Proctors and the Guest who escaped at Towton, as something that belonged to the old country and had been left there. Mercy took him at his word, and she did not learn until she was a woman grown that the old country had followed them. The cold, plain little colony was not empty of what the Faulkners hunted. Long winter nights, isolated farms, and a population who preferred to name their fears as witches or Indians rather than as anything else made a fine hunting ground. Mercy taught. She started as a girl of nineteen with six small children at her father's kitchen table, learning their letters, their psalms and their sums for a few pence a week or a sack of Indian corn, and within a few years she kept a proper dame school in a room built onto the house. She taught boys to read and girls to read and sew, rather more sternly than she would have liked, but with a patience that the Haverhill parents noted. The town books, in their loose way, called her a spinster, meaning a woman who lived by her spinning and her small teaching, though she was by then a wife, and the odd label stuck. She had a plain, tall, watchful look, a prim mouth, and a habit of tucking her pen behind her ear, and pupils remembered her for a certain dry humour that she showed only when a lesson was going well. The man she married in 1663 was Maurice Hutchinson, a young clerk in Haverhill who copied deeds and kept the town's records and who wrote the finest hand in the district. He was, as she learned soon after the wedding, a slayer, called at sixteen in a boarding house, and the news struck her less than he had feared. She told him she had suspected something, since he came in at odd hours smelling of burnt hawthorn and had a bruise on his arm the size of a hand. She thought it a fair trade for a husband who was a slayer to have a wife who could read a schedule, count powder and keep a straight face before a magistrate. Between them they arranged the household so that his nights and her days did not collide. She kept the door, the hearth and the chalk-marked ledger of his hours, and he kept her informed of the truth. Their two daughters were born in the years that followed. Martha Faulkner arrived in 1666 and took to her father's trade so early that she was reciting his rules before she could tie her shoes. The family custom of passing the surname down the women's line meant that both girls bore their mother's name and not the clerk's, and Mercy, who thought it a sensible custom, drew no attention to it. Clemence Faulkner, born in 1669, was not called. She was a bright, quiet, anxious girl who grew up to be the household's memory, writing letters, keeping accounts and looking after her mother when the illness came, and she stayed in the shadow of her sister without any evident bitterness. Mercy lived through the war and the panic that shaped the colony's second generation. King Philip's War in 1675 and 1676 raised the frontier in fire, and Haverhill knew fear at first hand, with families crowded into garrison houses, men taken from their fields and news arriving every week of another farm burned to the ground. Mercy taught her children in a garrison house that winter, with the smell of wet wool and gun oil, and she remembered afterwards that Maurice's night work was hard to tell from the militia's, so that no neighbour questioned his absences. She sent long letters to her sister Jane in Padiham, whom she never met, and the two women exchanged seeds and cuttings and the occasional guarded word about hunting on either side of the water. Then came the witchcraft panic of 1692, which the whole colony felt, and which reached the towns of the Merrimack valley with denunciations, hearings and jails. Mercy had spent her life among neighbours frightened of shadows, and she knew how easily the fear could turn on a woman who taught other people's children and kept odd hours. Maurice took particular pains that year to keep his hunting quiet, and Mercy kept the school open with a steady face, which was a hard thing to do when the girls in her care talked of nothing else. She fell ill that same winter. It was a wasting sickness, slow and painful, that reduced her over a year to a shadow, and though Clemence nursed her without rest and Maurice sat up beside her, nothing could be done. She died in 1693, aged fifty-two, a year after her sister Jane in Lancashire, and was buried in the old burying ground at Haverhill. The school passed to a widow, the ledger she had kept for Maurice's hours was folded into the family papers, and the town books gave her only the one line. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the Faulkner wife who kept a house safe for a hunter in a colony that was hunting the wrong shadows, and as the mother of a slayer she taught to read.