Patience Hale was born in 1707 in Salem Town, Massachusetts, in the decade when the town was still learning to live with what it had done in 1692. She became a milliner, a maker and trimmer of women's hats, caps and hoods, and in 1736 she married Gideon Mather Faulkner, a farmer, and moved inland to his family's upland acres. She never carried a rifle or stood a night watch. What she did was raise a daughter who did, keep a house on hard ground, and bring into the Faulkner household a trade that turned out to be useful in more ways than anyone expected.
Salem Town in her childhood was a busy, salt-smelling port. Its wharves handled codfish, molasses, timber and West Indian sugar, and its merchants were putting up tall gabled houses along the harbour road. It was also a town with a bad conscience. The accused of the witch trials had been formally cleared by the colony only in the years before her birth, and the grown-ups around her had a habit of dropping their voices when certain names came up. She grew up in a modest household near the water, and by all accounts she was a quiet child who liked small, exact work. She was apprenticed in her early teens to a milliner on Essex Street, where she learned to block a straw hat over a wooden form, to sew a hood in quilted silk, to trim a cap with lace and ribbon and to judge a customer's face in half a glance. The shop's clients included the merchants' wives of the Salem waterfront, and Patience learned early that good manners and good needlework could cross most social lines.
By her late twenties she had her own room and a small trade in the town, and she had the reputation of a skilled and slightly severe young woman who never gave short measure. It was at the end of a long summer in 1735, on a trip to a market fair at Andover, that she met Gideon Mather Faulkner. He was a farmer, born in 1713, tall, sunburnt, and awkward in a crowd, who had come to sell wool and to buy a length of ribbon for his sister. Patience sold him the ribbon. He came back within the month, at some considerable inconvenience, to buy another. They married in 1736, when she was twenty-nine and he twenty-three, an age gap that neither seems to have minded. Her friends thought it a step down; she told them that hats were a thin business in a town that could not agree on what to wear.
The farm was on the high ground of the county, on pasture and stony ridges where the Faulkners had grazed sheep for generations, and the country was harder and bleaker than anything in the harbour town. The family called the upland country the fells, a Lancashire word carried over the ocean by their ancestors and still in daily use in their house. There were stone walls, a slate-grey barn and a low, dark farmhouse with a big chimney, and the winds came straight off the hills in winter. Patience carried her blocks and her needles over the ridge in a cart, set up a table in the north-facing window for the light, and began to take orders from the neighbouring farms. She made caps for the women, hoods for the winter roads, hats for church, and she trained a few local girls to help. It was cold work and the money was small, but it kept the household in cloth and tea.
Gideon, though not a slayer himself, belonged to a family that was one; the Red Ledger had many hands in it, and his cousins used the farm as a way-station. Patience worked out the family's secret in her first year, without being told, from the pattern of visits, the mud on the boots and the size of the guests' bags, and she asked her husband directly. He told her. She said, so the story goes, that she had grown up in a town that had once hanged its neighbours for less than she was now being told, and that she could at least be trusted to keep her mouth shut. The trust held for the rest of her life. She took to sewing for the family's needs, and the fells farmhouse acquired a hidden habit: hoods and caps lined with thin strips of leather against a bite, collars stiffened to protect the throat, gloves cut to fit a hand that must load a rifle in the cold. The milliner's craft in that house had a second use that it did not advertise.
Their first child, Lucy Hale Faulkner, was born in 1738, and their second, Reuben Faulkner, in 1739. Lucy grew up watching her mother sew and her father's cousins clean their rifles, and she chose the second. She had the calling in her teens and became a vampire slayer; she died young, in 1763, twenty-five years after her birth and fourteen years after her mother. Reuben did not have the calling and lived on the farm; he died in 1784. Patience raised both with a firm hand and a plain love, teaching Lucy the stitch and the discipline of it as much as any lesson in marksmanship, and insisting that Reuben have an education, because a family of many secrets needed at least one member who could read a legal document.
The wider rivalry between the Faulkners and the Proctors touched her only lightly. She knew the story of Towton and the Guest, since every Faulkner child was raised on it, and she had a wry, unhurried view of the feud, remarking that a family which could not settle who let a single vampire slip in 1461 would probably still be arguing in a thousand years. The Red Ledger's tally interested her as a bookkeeper's exercise, and she was the sort of person who found the whole apparatus of ledgers rather solemn. She kept her own small account book of hats and yardage and was, in her own way, as scrupulous as any recorder of the tally.
Patience Hale died in 1749, aged forty-two, in an accident on the fells. She had gone up onto the high pasture in bad weather to bring in the ewes, when the ground gave way under her on a wet slope, and she fell. It was an ordinary death of the hill farm, a sudden slip on ground she had known for thirteen years, and the family had no cause to think it anything else. Gideon lived until 1785 and never remarried. He kept her blocks on a shelf in the front room. Her daughter Lucy carried the family's needlework habits into her own hunting, and the ledgers remember Patience as the woman who sewed the household's armour without saying so. Within the Slayerverse her name is rarely spoken, but a good deal of what the Faulkners wore into the dark was made at her table.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
