Nancy Faulkner

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

Nancy Faulkner was born in 1779 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lived sixty-one years as a milliner, a carpenter's wife and the youngest of the four children of Caleb Faulkner, the Lexington Courier. She did not hunt, unlike her three elder siblings, and the Ledger has no entry in her name. Yet it was Nancy who, after the deaths of her father, sisters and brothers, kept the family's letters, and it is from her trunk of correspondence that most of what is known about the Faulkner children's years survives. She died in 1840 of the sweating sickness, as the family called it, at the age of sixty-one. Her father, Caleb Faulkner, was born in 1741 and lived until 1802. He was a printer's apprentice and courier turned vampire slayer, and the Ledger calls him The Lexington Courier after the ride he made in April 1775. Her mother, Naomi Adams, born in 1742, was a boarding-house keeper who died in 1783, when Nancy was four. Nancy remembered her mother only as a voice and a smell, the voice of a woman calling up a stair and the smell of bread and lye soap. Her siblings were all older. Ebenezer Adams Faulkner, born in 1770, became a blacksmith and a slayer. Silas Faulkner, born in 1772, became a boatman and a slayer. Naomi Adams Faulkner, born in 1774, became a shopkeeper and a slayer. In the nursery of the Faulkner household, Nancy was the baby whom the others carried, taught and shielded, and whom, on account of her youth, nobody called to the hunt. Northampton in the year of her birth was a market town in the Connecticut valley, with a wide main street lined with elms, a courthouse, a meeting house with a tall steeple, and a great many taverns. It was a town of farmers, lawyers and clergy, and its most famous resident had been the minister Jonathan Edwards, whose sermons on the wrath of God still echoed. The valley was rich, the meadows along the river produced corn, tobacco and onions, and the Faulkners, who had moved there from the Delaware when the war took her father back to Massachusetts, lived in a rented house near the common. It was a good place to grow up, but not an easy one. Her mother's death took away the household's centre, and her father, who was often away, left the children largely to the care of the eldest. By the time she was ten, Nancy was sleeping in her sister Naomi's bed in Concord and learning to sew. It was sewing that set the course of her life. Naomi, who had a shop, found her a place with a milliner, and by fourteen Nancy was an apprentice making bonnets. The trade of the milliner in the 1790s was a blend of tailoring, haberdashery and fashion, and it involved the making of hats, caps, bonnets, ruffs, ribbons, gloves, veils and trimmings for women who could afford them. Nancy was deft. She could sew a straw bonnet that held its shape, cut a silk lining without waste, and trim a cap with ribbon in a way that made the plainest face look well. By twenty she had her own small shop in Northampton, with a bow window, a counter and a mirror, and a clientele of lawyers' wives and ministers' daughters. She married Asa Sherman in 1807, when she was twenty-eight. Asa, born in 1781, was a carpenter of the town who had built the cabinets in her shop, and he was a quiet, dry, humorous man who was not a hunter, knew nothing of the Ledger and did not ask. Nancy, who had grown up in a household that took secrets for granted, told him what he needed to know after a year and found that he was unperturbed. They set up house together above the shop, he making furniture and house frames on the ground floor and she making hats above. Their daughter Ida Sherman Faulkner was born in 1809 and lived until 1872. Their son Lewis Faulkner Sherman was born in 1811 and lived until 1894, a long life that took him into the age of the telegraph and the Civil War. Neither was called to the hunt, and both grew up as ordinary children of the Connecticut valley, apart from a few visits to the aunts and uncles in other towns, and a family habit of locking the shutters early. Nancy's part in the Faulkner story is best understood through the letters. After her father's death in 1802, and as her siblings scattered, she became the family's correspondent. Silas wrote from Kentucky and then New Orleans. Ebenezer wrote from Wilmington. Naomi wrote from Concord. Nancy, in Northampton, was the one who answered every letter promptly, forwarded news, kept a record of births and deaths, and wrote to each sibling about the others. She kept the letters in a japanned tin box under the bed, tied in bundles with a ribbon, and by the time she died there were more than three hundred of them. They gave the Faulkners of the next generation a picture of a household that had scattered across the country and never stopped talking to each other. The deaths are recorded there too: her brother Ebenezer in 1815, her sister Naomi in 1821, and her brother Silas in 1831. Asa died in 1839, and she followed him the next year. In the autumn of 1840 the sickness that the old women called the sweating sickness went through the valley, and Nancy, who had nursed her husband and a neighbour's child, caught it and died within four days. She was sixty-one. Her son brought the tin box to the Faulkner cousins in Concord. A few of the letters in her tin box have been quoted often enough in the family to be known by heart. One, from her brother Silas in 1804, written on the first night of the river voyage to New Orleans, describes the flatboat, the cow on the deck and his wife asleep with the churn for a pillow. Another, from her sister Naomi in 1819, describes a night in Concord spent watching a road for something that never came, and ends with a recipe for ginger cake. Nancy kept both for the same reason, which she gave in a note pinned to the lid: that people are more than their work, and someone ought to keep the rest. Nancy Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the milliner of Northampton, the youngest of the Lexington Courier's children and the keeper of the family's letters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the people who did the work of remembering, whose careful correspondence let later generations know what the hunters were like at home.