Olive Faulkner

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

Olive Faulkner was born in 1532 in Bolton, in the Lancashire moorland country where the fustian trade was beginning to make small fortunes out of linen warp and cotton wool, and where a brewster could always find a market. The town straggled along the River Croal beneath the dark shoulder of Winter Hill. Its houses were of timber and daub with thatched roofs, and its market cross was busy with sellers of oatcake, cheese, cloth and ale. Her father, Harry Faulkner, made arrows. A fletcher of that era, in a country still bound by the old statutes that required every man to keep a bow and practise at the butts, was a respectable tradesman, and Harry's shop smelled of goose feather, hot glue and seasoned ash. Her mother, Alice Bulcock, had come to the house as a servant before she became its mistress, and she brought with her the sturdy habits of a woman who had never been idle. The house was small and full. Olive was the elder of two daughters, and her sister Jocosa Faulkner, born in 1535, was a quiet, watchful child who adored her. The girls slept in a loft over the fletching room, listening to the tap of the mallet and the murmur of their father's customers. From an early age they were taught the female arts of the household: how to dip rushes in tallow for light, how to keep a cow, how to bake on a bakestone, and above all how to make ale. Ale was the ordinary drink of England, safer than most water and cheaper than wine, and a household that brewed well could always trade its surplus. Alice taught her elder daughter the process with a domestic precision that was almost ritual. The grain was malted and dried, the malt mashed in hot water, the wort boiled with a little herb, the whole set to ferment under a cloth. Olive proved to have a nose for it. The time was one of upheaval, and Bolton felt it. She was four when the Pilgrimage of Grace passed through the north, and eight when the last of the monastic houses in the district vanished from the map. The abbey lands around Whalley and Cockersand, which had furnished so much barley and wool, came into new hands. Under the boy-king Edward the churches were stripped, and under Queen Mary they were dressed again, and the parish at Bolton got through it with a great deal of quiet muttering. Ale, at least, was constant. A brewster was subject to the ale-conners who tasted her batches for strength and price, and to the constable who checked her measures, but the trade was independent and, for a woman with no husband, it was one of the few dignified ways to earn a living. Olive never married. This was not, as the neighbours whispered, for want of suitors. A steady girl with her own trade and a decent portion of a fletcher's savings was a match many families would have welcomed, and at least two came calling. She turned them away with a brisk courtesy. The family tradition was that she felt bound to the house and its unspoken business, and that she took her responsibility as the elder sister with great seriousness. In those years the Faulkners of Bolton kept, as all the Red Ledger's people did, a store of information about the strange things of the moors, and Olive, who talked to farmers and drovers and travelling men across her ale-bench, was the best-informed woman in the town. She was not a vampire slayer, but she knew the movement of rumour better than any hunter, and her table was where the news came first. Her brewing became her calling. By her early twenties she had set up on her own in a lean-to behind the family house, with a copper, a mash tun, and a hanging bush of green boughs that announced fresh ale to any passer-by. She sold by the quart and the gallon, brewed strong for weddings and small for harvest gangs, and was known for a clean, malty, faintly bitter brew that stayed sweet longer than her rivals'. She worked in the old way, with no hops, since hopped beer was still regarded in the north as a foreign novelty, and used a little bog myrtle or ground ivy to give the ale its bite. She was forceful, funny, sharp-tongued and quick to laugh. Men said she could draw a quart faster than a clerk could write a receipt. She kept a stout stick beneath the counter, and once used it on a drunken farrier who tried to make free with her stores. Her mother died in 1559, and after that Olive was the mistress of the house in all but name. Alice Bulcock had lived for forty-nine years, most of them on her feet, and she was buried in the churchyard with her ale-spoon tied to her wrist, according to a family story that is probably embroidered. The blow made Olive quieter, and she took more of her sister's company and less of the public house. She also took longer walks. With the ale business settled she liked to go out onto the moors above the town, on Sunday afternoons, to gather herbs for her brewing and to think. The fells in those years were still wild country, with peat hags, sheep tracks, old stone walls and the ruins of a shepherd's hut here and there, and Olive knew them well. The end came in 1566. She went up to the fells one autumn day to fetch bog myrtle, and she did not return. It was a fine morning that turned suddenly to mist by afternoon, as it does on the high moors, and a search party of neighbours and Faulkner cousins went out with torches. They found her at the foot of a rocky scar, where she had fallen in the fog. The verdict was an accident on the fells, and there was nothing more to it, though a grieving family will sometimes look for more. Olive was thirty-four. She was buried beside her mother, and her father Harry, who lived on until 1571, is said to have stopped making arrows for a season. Her legacy was quiet. Jocosa inherited the copper and the lean-to but chose to take up the loom instead, and the brewing lapsed. Yet in the household accounts and the memories of the Bolton neighbours, Olive persisted as a kind of standard. She was the woman who never wasted a grain, who never watered her ale, and who made her table a place where news could be told. Later readers of the Red Ledger commented on how much of what the Bolton line knew of the moors came, in the end, through her. In the long story of the Slayerverse she is one of the unmarried aunts of the family, a Bolton brewster of the Tudor years whose kitchen was the listening post of the Faulkner hunters.