Olive Duckworth

Spouse of Abraham Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Olive Duckworth was born in 1614 at Garstang, Lancashire, a market town on the river Wyre where the Lancaster road ran through a wide street lined with low thatched houses and the cattle fair filled the whole place with lowing and mud each spring. It was a town of drovers, cheese-makers and linen-weavers, set on the edge of the Fylde's flat wet country, and it lay on the traffic between the Lancashire cloth towns and the northern pastures. The records name neither her parents nor her brothers and sisters, and it is likely that she grew up in one of the small weaving households that made up most of the town, where a girl learned the trade the way she learned her prayers, by hearing it repeated until it stuck. She was set to the loom at ten. The Garstang weavers made a plain, strong linen and a coarse woollen cloth called kersey, and Olive worked at both in a low room with a floor of beaten earth, where the light from the one window fell across the warp in a pale bar and the damp of the river rose through the walls in winter. She was a small, straight-backed girl with a wide mouth and a way of tilting her head when she was thinking, and she had the sort of steady, rhythmic hands that a weaver needs. By sixteen she was known in the town for the evenness of her cloth and for a habit of doing sums in her head faster than the dealers could write them. She kept her own accounts, and she was not to be cheated on the price of a piece. She left Garstang in her early twenties with a bundle of finished cloth and a letter to a Bolton dealer, which is how she came to the market town where she would spend the rest of her life. The dealer bought her cloth, paid her fairly, and mentioned that a cooper he knew was looking for someone to make bags and covers for the cooperage. The cooper was Abraham Faulkner, a broad, slow-speaking man of twenty-five with wood shavings in his hair, and he asked her three questions in a row about her loom and none about herself. She answered the three and then asked him one in return, about whether he always stood at a door for a minute before walking through it. He said that he did. She said she wanted to know why. That curiosity, the family says, was the whole courtship. They were married in 1636. The ceremony was at Bolton parish church, and the wedding meal, eaten in the house of a friend, was a plate of boiled beef and a pudding, with small beer from the cooperage. The couple took a narrow house near the yard, and Olive set her loom in the front window, where the light was best and where passers-by could see the shuttle move. In 1637 their son George Faulkner was born, and three years later, in 1640, their daughter Edith Faulkner. Olive worked through both pregnancies and returned to the loom a week after each birth, a habit that the Bolton midwives disapproved of and that she defended by saying the cloth would not wait. The household she made was an orderly, warm and slightly noisy one. There was always a pot on the fire, a barrel in the yard, and a bolt of cloth half-woven in the window. She was the one who noticed, in 1639, that her husband had come home from the chapel loft pale and silent, and who asked him no question at all. She simply set a bowl of broth in front of him and a candle beside it, and waited. Within a week she had seen the muddy boots, the missing hours and the odd sharpened stakes drying in the back of the workshop, and had put it together. She said afterwards that she had guessed on the first evening that the trouble was not an illness, and that the only sensible thing had been to feed him and let him speak when he was ready. He did, three nights later, and she listened until dawn without interrupting once. After that she became the anchor of the family's second occupation. Olive was not a slayer, but she took on the tasks that made slaying possible in a town where the neighbours watched every doorway. She kept a rota of the times her husband would be out, so that a caller could be told he was delivering casks at a distant farm. She wove dark, plain cloth for his coats. She sewed the hidden pockets into his jackets. When he came home at dawn with a gash across the forearm she dressed it with the honey and yarrow she had learned from her mother, and she taught her children, when they were called in their turn, to make it themselves. George and Edith grew up in a house where the hardest lessons were given at the kitchen table and where nobody, ever, said the word vampire above a murmur. The civil wars split the northern gentry, and Bolton was dragged into them. In the spring of 1644, when Prince Rupert's army stormed the town, Olive was thirty and had two small children, a loom and a husband who could not be found. She hid the children in the cooperage under a pile of staves, sat at her loom in the window with the shutters open, and went on weaving until the soldiers had passed. It was, she said, the safest place in the house, since no soldier would suspect a woman working at her cloth. The looting that followed took the cooperage's stock of new casks, but it left the house alone, and when Abraham returned he found her at the loom, and the cloth on it, half-finished, perfectly even. She was gentle with her own family's grievances and dry with the rivalry. When a Proctor courier stopped at the house one wet night in the 1650s, exhausted and soaked, she gave him supper and a bed by the fire, and told him in the morning that he might be from Yorkshire but he was still a guest. It became a family saying that one did not turn a Proctor away from a Faulkner hearth, even though the ledgers of the two sides disagreed about almost everything else. The one Guest she had no time for was the one the whole feud was about, and she said so. Her health failed slowly, worn by long hours in a damp room. She died in 1668 at the age of fifty-four, of a fever that took hold in the autumn and did not break. Abraham kept her loom in the window for the rest of his life, and the cloth she had left on it was never cut. Her son George survived her until 1685, and her daughter Edith until 1710. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the weaver of Garstang who married a cooper, and whose loom in the window was the lamp by which a whole household found its way home.