Mercy Thorne Faulkner

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

Mercy Thorne Faulkner was a seamstress of Clitheroe, born there in 1663 in a house that smelled of candle-wax and hot iron, and the sound most associated with her in the family's memory was the small dry click of a thimble on a brass button. She was the eldest daughter of a household that made its living from light and cloth, and she carried both trades into a long unmarried life that the Faulkner ledgers, in their unsentimental way, describe as useful. Clitheroe in the years of her childhood was a small market town under the stump of its Norman castle, a huddle of limestone houses on the edge of the Ribble valley. The castle keep, slighted after the civil war, loomed over the roofs; the Saturday market drew farmers from Pendle and Bowland; and the town's living came from wool, leather, tallow and the traffic of carriers on the road to Whalley and Skipton. The Restoration had put the old church back in order and driven the sober independents into a corner, but the people of Clitheroe kept their opinions to themselves and their doors bolted after dark. It was a place where everyone knew everyone's business and no one repeated it, and Mercy learned early to do her work in that atmosphere: quietly, carefully and with her ears open. Her father, Stuart Faulkner, was a chandler who made and sold candles from a shop on the market street, and her mother, Shona Thorne, was a dressmaker of the border-country House of Thorne who had come south as a young woman and brought with her a set of tools, a flinty accent and a habit of watching doors. Mercy was born into a family that kept the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian tally of vampires taken, and her mother's Thorne kin were reivers' children who had turned to hunting in the mountains. Neither parent was a slayer, but the shop stood at the middle of a network of people who were, and the children were brought up knowing when to leave a room. The family spent a few years in Massachusetts, where Stuart had kinsmen, and Mercy's brother Gervase Thorne Faulkner was born in Newbury in 1666 during that stay; the family returned to Lancashire while both children were small, and Mercy remembered the crossing chiefly as a great deal of weather. She was apprenticed to a tailor's widow at fourteen, and there she learned the skills that shaped her life. A seamstress in the 1670s did not sew at a machine, for there were none. She worked by hand, with a steel needle, linen thread waxed against a lump of beeswax to keep it from fraying, and a brass thimble open at the end. She cut from patterns pinned in the lining of a chest, stitched seams in a running back-stitch that would take the strain of a labouring woman's arms, and learned to line a doublet and to bind a buttonhole with silk. She was fast and neat and had a particular gift for hiding things in a garment: a pocket at the small of a coat, a seam that opened on a snap, a hem that would hold a thin weight of silver thread. Those gifts, in her family, were no idle skill. Mercy did not hunt, and the Ledger did not ask her to. What she did was make the hunters' clothes. The Faulkner slayers of the Ribble valley, who needed to move quietly at night, to take a blow across the arm without tearing, and to carry a stake, a blade and a small flask without a clink, went to her for their coats. She made them close-fitting leather-faced jackets with a hidden inner sleeve, breeches with a double knee and a pocket at the thigh, and hoods lined against a bite at the neck. The neck-cloths she sewed carried a strip of tightly woven silk under the linen, and it was said that a Faulkner in a Mercy coat was harder to kill than a Faulkner in armour. She did the work for the price of the cloth and refused any more, a habit that her brother Gervase, who had gone back across the Atlantic, described in a letter as the family's best economy. Her mother's death in 1682 was the first great break of her life. Shona died at forty-nine after a winter fever, and Mercy, then nineteen, took over the household while her father Stuart, forty-three and grey overnight, went on with the shop. She raised nothing but her own skills, and did so cheerfully: the years that followed were spent between the chandlery and the workroom, with the house in between. She never married. Family tradition holds that she was courted more than once, most seriously by a young glover of Whalley, and turned him away on the ground that she had a shop, a father and a set of customers who would not thrive without her. She had no children. She was the sort of aunt to whom nieces are sent for a year to learn a trade, and several Faulkner girls in the next generation credited her with the first straight seam they ever sewed. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was, in Clitheroe, an affair of anxiety. Word came in December that the king had fled, and that the Protestant prince was landing in the west; soldiers were quartered in the town for a few weeks in the new year; and the Faulkner shop sold more tallow candles than it had in a decade. Mercy took to her needle a commission for forty red coats that the parish militia required, and finished them in a fortnight, sitting up with her father at the bench. The Red Ledger noted that the year's tally had been unaffected by the change of sovereign. It noted also, in a hand she recognised, that the coats had been sewn properly. As Stuart aged she took over the shop, a change the town accepted without much fuss, and she kept the sign over the door with her father's name on it until he died in 1706, at the age of sixty-seven. She was forty-three, unmarried and mistress of a business that supplied light and clothing to half the valley, and for the rest of her life she lived alone above it, sewing by the window in the long northern dusk. She kept in touch with her brother Gervase by the slow post of the Atlantic. His letters came rarely and were preserved in the shop drawer, tied with a strip of her own cloth. When news of his death reached her in 1712, she stopped work for an afternoon, which the neighbours thought a great sign of feeling. A wasting illness, whose beginnings she ignored for most of a year, took her in 1714. She died at fifty-one and was buried in Clitheroe near her parents. The shop was sold, but the last coats she had cut were sewn up by a niece and delivered on the day of the funeral, with an apology for their tardiness. In the family record Mercy Thorne Faulkner appears not as a hunter but as the hands behind the hunters, and in the Slayerverse she is the model of the Faulkner seamstress: a woman who understood that the Red Ledger was carried as much on the back as in the hand, and who left no child but a great many well-made coats.