Phoebe Ingersoll

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

Phoebe Ingersoll was born in 1645 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a frontier township on the Merrimack that was barely ten years old and still smelled of raw pine and turned earth. The settlers had laid out house lots along a single street, each with a garden and a well, and the meeting-house stood at the centre like the hub of a wheel. Her people were farmers and craftsmen of the plain sort, unaffiliated with any slayer house, and nothing in her childhood suggested that her name would one day sit in the margins of a ledger kept by strangers. She learned early what the town expected of a girl: to card wool, to spin, to keep the hearth, to sit still through a sermon that might run three hours in a building with no stove, and to answer the catechism without stumbling. The trade that came to define her was weaving. In a Massachusetts Bay town of the 1650s, cloth was money as much as coin was, and coin was scarce; families paid the minister, the miller and the tax collector in corn, pork and yardage. Phoebe took to the loom in her teens, working a heavy upright frame set up in the lean-to of her parents' house. She wove linsey-woolsey, a hard-wearing blend of linen warp and wool weft, and later coverlets and plain blankets that neighbours ordered a season in advance. She was known for an even beat and for refusing to hurry a piece merely to please a customer. A length of her cloth was said to hold its shape through a decade of Massachusetts winters, and the phrase used about her in the town was that she never left a thread she had not looked at twice. She married Josiah Faulkner in 1666. He was a Lancashire man, a year her junior, the son of Anne Faulkner, and he came to the marriage carrying a burden he explained only slowly. The Faulkners kept the Red Ledger, the tally of vampires taken by the Lancastrian side since 1455, and Josiah belonged to the line that had inherited the duty of writing in it. He was a vampire slayer in a colony that would have burned him for half of what he knew, and he had spent his early twenties going back and forth across the Atlantic on the errands of a clerk, learning the shipping lanes and the ports where a foreigner could disembark unquestioned. Phoebe was not told everything at once. By her own later account, kept in fragments by her descendants, she understood the outline of it within their first winter, when she found him at the kitchen table at three in the morning cleaning a flintlock and whittling stakes from a hawthorn branch he had carried in a sack. What she did with that knowledge is the reason the ledgers remember her. She never took up a stake herself; she had no calling, and the family did not pretend otherwise. But a household in a Puritan township lived under constant view, and someone had to make an absent husband explicable. Phoebe became the household's cover. When Josiah was gone for three nights, it was a cooper's errand upriver, or a journey to a buyer of hides. When a neighbour noticed the smell of hawthorn smoke, she was already speaking of a poultice. Her weaving gave her reason to be in every kitchen in Haverhill, taking measures and delivering finished cloth, and she listened as she worked. A farmer's talk of livestock found bled white in a pasture, or of a stranger who would not come indoors on a Sabbath, reached Josiah within the day. The Faulkner ledger notes several entries in the 1670s whose first lead came from a woman at a loom. Her children came quickly enough to fill the house. Nathaniel Faulkner was born in 1668 and would become a slayer like his father. Hannah Faulkner followed in 1678, a daughter who did not take up the craft but lived into her seventies. Jeremy Faulkner was born in 1682 and also became a slayer, and the youngest, Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, born in 1685, carried his mother's family name as a middle name and lived until 1762 without ever taking the stake. Phoebe raised all four to be quiet in company. The rule of the house was that a child might ask any question at home but none abroad, and the shared reticence of the Faulkner children was remarked on by the minister, who took it for piety. The long years of the 1670s tested her more than any hunt could. King Philip's War tore through the settlements in 1675 and 1676, and Haverhill sat exposed to the northwest, on the path of raiding parties and refugee families alike. Garrison houses were fortified, men were kept on watch, and people slept in their clothes. It was in this period that Josiah brought the Red Ledger across the water for good, sewn into the lining of his coat, after the years of coming and going. Phoebe unpicked the seams herself, on a night when the whole town was awake and afraid of a different enemy, and stitched the book into a hidden pocket inside a bolster where it would survive a fire. The ledger of a war that was two centuries old in feud terms was thus kept safe under the noise of a war that most of New England thought was the only one being fought. Where the Proctors touched her life, it was at a distance. The Faulkners of the Massachusetts branch knew that their rivals kept the White Ledger somewhere to the south and west, and that the contest of tallies had not ended with the ocean. Josiah spoke of it with dry humour, as one might mention a cousin who always won at cards, and Phoebe took the same tone. The blame for the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461, was a family matter that she regarded with the mild scepticism of an outsider; she said once that a feud carried for two hundred years was a sort of weaving too, and that someone ought to check the pattern for mistakes. It was a remark the family repeated for generations. Josiah died in 1699, but Phoebe did not live to see it. She died in 1691 of the plague, aged 46, in a year when sickness moved through the towns of the Merrimack valley and left households short-handed at the worst season for it. She was buried in the burying ground behind the meeting-house without a stone, as many were, and her loom was passed to Hannah, who was thirteen. The loss shook Josiah badly. He kept hunting for eight more years, but the surviving accounts describe him as a man who had lost the person who made the rest of his life credible. The ledger entries in his hand after 1691 are shorter and more bare. In the Faulkner tradition Phoebe holds the place of the first person who stood beside a slayer without the calling and made the work possible. The line that led through Nathaniel and Jeremy on into Kentucky and later to New Orleans owed its continuity partly to her: to the hiding place in the bolster, to the ordinary lies told at the meeting-house door, and to the four children she taught to be discreet. In the modern Slayerverse her name appears in the roll of those the Red Ledger records as supporters rather than hunters, and the family still speaks of a good, tight piece of cloth as Ingersoll work.