Nesta Faulkner

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

Whalley, where Nesta Faulkner was born in 1543, was a village that still lived in the shadow of something that was no longer there. The great Cistercian abbey beside the Calder had been suppressed only a few years before, its last abbot hanged at Lancaster for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its buildings were being stripped for stone and lead. Children played in the roofless cloister and drank from wells the monks had dug. Nesta's earliest sensory memory, the family later said, was the smell of wet plaster and old smoke where a wall had come down, and the sight of carters hauling away carved stone in the grey light. Her father was John Thwaites, born in 1524, a tanner, and the family lived with the tanner's inescapable smells: bark liquor, lime pits, wet hides and the sour reek of dog dung used to soften leather. Her mother, Margery Faulkner, was born in 1519 and by family custom kept her own name after her marriage, as the Faulkners so often did. The parish called her a cloth merchant's wife, since she dealt in cloth on the side and had the shrewdness for it, and it was her wit rather than her husband's that kept the household afloat. Nesta was the eldest of three. Ralph Faulkner followed in 1551, taking the Faulkner name as his mother's line required, and Hugh Thwaites, who took his father's, was born in 1557. John Thwaites died in 1560, when Nesta was seventeen, and the girl's education for the trades of the country began in earnest. She learned to card wool, drawing the raw fleece between two paddles set with wire teeth until the fibres lay straight and ready for the spinner. It was one of the first stages of the cloth trade, done at home by women and children, poorly paid but constant, and in the hill villages behind Whalley half the households were in it. Nesta became remarkably good at it. She could card a stone of wool in a day and sort a fleece by feel, and she had a stubborn, precise temperament that turned dull work into a small craft. She carried it from her mother's table to her own, and she was never, in her whole life, without wool on her hands. She married Harry Rishton in 1562, when she was nineteen, in the parish church at Whalley. He was a shepherd on the fells, a slow-spoken man of twenty-three whom she had met at a clipping, and she chose him, she said, because he was the only man there who did not try to overcharge her. They took a cottage on the edge of the moor with a croft for the sheep, and Nesta carded the wool that Harry's flock produced and much more besides, buying fleeces from neighbours and selling the finished slivers to spinners as far away as Colne. She kept the money in a small oak box and knew to the farthing what was in it. Her daughters came in quick succession. Tiffany Faulkner was born in 1564 and took her mother's name, following the Faulkner custom of letting the line pass through the women, and Blanche Rishton was born in 1566 and took her father's. Nesta raised them in the manner of a north-country household in Elizabeth's reign, on oatcakes and buttermilk, with a lamp of tallow and a Bible read aloud at Sunday, and with strict rules against wasting anything. She taught the girls to card at six and to spin at eight. She also taught them, quietly, the more hidden lesson of the Faulkners: that there were things in the dark that the parish priest did not preach about, and that the family owed a duty to watch for them. The Red Ledger was in her blood on both sides. Her mother's name was Faulkner, and her brother Ralph was a vampire slayer, one of the hunters who took the Lancastrian side of the tally begun by Hugh Faulkner in 1455 in the years of the Wars of the Roses. Nesta did not fight, and did not pretend she could. She kept the household in which the hunters sheltered. She carded wool by lamplight while Ralph sharpened his blades at her table, and she washed the blood out of his sleeves without a word. When he brought news of a nest on the moor or a dead traveller on the packhorse road, she listened and remembered. The family called her the keeper of the kitchen ledger, meaning the private tally of who had come and gone, who had been fed and who had left with a bandage. Her daughter Blanche's calling was a shock she had half expected. Blanche, quiet and watchful like her father, showed the signs young, and it was Nesta who sat up with her the night it came. She did not weep, and she did not forbid, but she made her daughter promise to eat before every hunt and to come home to sleep afterward, a rule that the Faulkner women passed down for generations. She saw Blanche through her early hunts on the fells above Whalley and the Ribble valley, and she bore the news of her daughter's death in 1602 with the stiffness of a woman who had prepared herself for it every day for thirty years. The events of her age went past her without much altering her routine. She was twenty-six when the northern earls rose in 1569, forty-five in the Armada summer of 1588, when beacons burned along the coast and the county armed itself against a landing that did not come. She lived through poor harvests, long winters and plague years, and she lived into the reign of King James. Harry died in 1603, and she survived him by two years, working on her carding to the end, with a fine dust of wool settling in her hair. In 1605 she was taken by a violent fever, the family calling it the sweating sickness, the old killing sweat that older people remembered from Henry's day, and she died within a day and a night, aged sixty-two. She was buried at Whalley within sight of the ruined abbey. Her mother Margery had died in 1591, and her daughter Tiffany would live until 1621. In the Faulkner ledgers Nesta has only a brief line, calling her a woman who "carded the wool and kept the count." The family remembers more. She was the practical centre of a shepherd's household that produced a vampire slayer, and she is one of the reasons the Slayerverse remembers so many Faulkner women as the quiet strength behind the hunters.