Millicent Faulkner

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

Millicent Faulkner was born in 1612 at Whalley, Lancashire, under the broken shadow of the abbey, in the year the whole district was talking about the witches of Pendle. The great hill stood on the horizon of her childhood, and the assizes at Lancaster that summer, which sent ten people to the gallows, were the first public event she was old enough to remember hearing about at the table. Her father, Nicholas Faulkner, was the reason the talk at that table was never quite what it seemed. He was a yeoman's son with a taste for other people's secrets, and he had made himself, quietly and without any salary, a watcher of the district's more peculiar households. The Faulkner slayers called him The Pendle Watcher, and the Red Ledger carries his entries in a crabbed hand, though he was careful never to write down what he had seen in a form that a magistrate could have read. Her mother, Gunnora Hoyle, was a seamstress, born in 1588, and she was the source of the skill that made Millicent's life. Whalley was a village of stone cottages, a bridge over the Calder and a good many alehouses, but it had also the trade that follows a great parish: baptisms, weddings, funerals, all requiring clothes. Gunnora sat at her window with a needle from dawn until the light failed, and her daughters sat beside her. Millicent learned the running stitch, the back stitch and the fine overcast seam before she could read, and by twelve she could cut a bodice from a paper pattern and fit it on a customer without a tape. In later years she said that she had learned two things from her mother's window: that a well-cut garment hides everything, and that a woman who sews is a woman nobody watches. The household grew. Her sisters Anne, born in 1615, and Gunnora, born in 1619, and her brother Ivo, born in 1621, filled the cottage with noise, and Millicent, as the eldest, was the one who kept order in it. None of the children was called to the hunt. Nicholas was firm about it, and the ledgers give his reason in his own words: one slayer in a household was a risk, and two was a war. He asked his daughters instead to be his ears, and they were. A dressmaker hears everything, because every customer talks while being pinned, and the Faulkner ledgers were fed, for decades, by what was said in a fitting room. When a farmer's wife mentioned that her husband had stopped eating at table, or a squire's daughter admitted that the new gardener never came out in daylight, Millicent wrote a line on a scrap of paper and tucked it into her father's hat. Nicholas died in 1631, when she was nineteen, and the household was thrown back on its own resources. Millicent did not weep in public. She took over the making of her mother's more expensive orders, kept the family in bread and coal, and continued to pass what she heard through the channel her father had used, which now ran to a cousin who rode the Clitheroe road. It was in those years that she was first courted by Stuart Thorne, a yeoman of the House of Thorne, born in 1615 at Kielder in Northumberland, who had come south with a hunter's pack and a plain, watchful manner and who had taken a lease on a farm above Whalley. He was three years younger than she was, which the village thought remarkable, and he was courteous in a fashion that made her suspicious at first, because she was used to people who wanted something. They married in 1636, when she was twenty-four, at the parish church, in a ceremony the ledgers describe as small and correct. Her mother Gunnora, who lived until 1643, gave her a wedding shift of her own making and a thimble that had belonged to her mother. The new household was a farmhouse of grey stone with a stone-flagged kitchen and a loft for the fleeces, and Millicent continued to take in sewing there, setting up a table beside the window where the light was best. Her first child, Prudence Faulkner, was born in 1637, and her son Stuart Faulkner followed in 1639. Both children took the Faulkner surname, which was the family's custom, and neither was called to be a slayer, though both grew up in a house where a border-bred father and a sharp-eyed mother kept a great many rules that were not explained. The civil wars split the northern gentry, and Whalley was in the middle of it. The Assheton family and the great houses nearby were divided, the roads were full of soldiers, and the cloth trade collapsed for a time, so that Millicent's work took on a curious importance. She made clothes for widows and mended uniforms for anyone who paid, and she learned to read a regiment from the state of its hems. She also saw that the disorder of the years gave the creatures cover, because a village that was accustomed to strange men in the night stopped noticing one more. Her reports on this went to the Faulkner slayers of the district, and Stuart, though not himself a slayer, went out to check her suspicions on the moor with his mother's old border craft, a quiet way of walking that the ledgers call the Thorne tread. Between them they were responsible for the setting of many an ambush, and for the survival of a few slayers who otherwise would not have noticed the trap in time. She had no love for the feud with the Proctors, but she did not dismiss it. When a Proctor dressmaker from Skipton visited Whalley in the 1650s, Millicent gave her a bed for two nights and traded patterns with her over supper, and the two women, in an exchange the family enjoyed retelling, compared their ledgers of gossip with a mutual, unspoken respect. She thought the argument over the Guest at Towton was a matter for men with swords, and she told her children so. Yet she also insisted, with the stubbornness of her father, that the tallies be kept honestly, because a family that lied in its own books would lie in its own house. She died in 1663 at the age of fifty-one, of a fall from a horse. She had been riding to a fitting at a house near Clitheroe when the animal shied at a flock of starlings on the road, and she was thrown against a wall. The village turned out in numbers for the funeral, more than her modest position would have led anyone to expect, and Stuart stood at the graveside for so long that the sexton had to ask him to come away. Her daughter Prudence, who lived to 1713, kept her thimble, and her son Stuart, who lived to 1706, kept her pattern book. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the dressmaker whose pins gathered the intelligence of a whole district, and whose sharp ear and steady needle helped the Red Ledger keep its reputation for accuracy.