Piers Faulkner

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

Piers Faulkner was the only mason in Rochdale who was still called an apprentice at sixty. He was born there in 1493, in the Lancashire market town where the River Roch ran brown with dye and fuller's earth below a parish church perched on its hill, the son of Godfrey Danby and Quenild Faulkner. His father was a drover, a big, unhurried man who spent much of the year on the road with other men's cattle, bringing black Scottish beasts down from the Border markets and over the Pennines to the fattening pastures of the Lancashire plain, and taking Lancashire stock the other way. His mother was a dairymaid, and a vampire slayer known in the family as The Silent Bridle. She belonged to a cadet branch descended from Hugh Faulkner, founder of the Red Ledger in 1455, and the children took her name rather than their father's, by the old custom that let the Faulkner surname pass through its daughters. A sister, Agnes Faulkner, followed in 1494. The house on the edge of town smelled of milk, wet hay and beasts. Godfrey's droving meant weeks of absence, and when he returned he came in slowly, like a man who had forgotten which end of the house the door was in, smelling of peat smoke and cattle, with news of prices at Skipton, Bradford and Wakefield. He kept his tally of miles and heads in notches on a hazel stick, which became one of the family's small jokes, since the Faulkners kept tallies of a different kind. Quenild, meanwhile, was up before light for the milking at a dairy farm on the moor edge, and was said to be able to settle a frightened cow with a hand on the flank and no sound at all. What the neighbours did not know was that the same gift worked on the things that frightened cows. Piers learned early that his mother's silence was not shyness, and that some nights she did not come home until the milking was long done. At fourteen he was bound to a master mason who ran a yard behind the church and took work across the parish, building farm gables, church windows and the long dry-stone boundaries that laced the moors. Piers learned to dress a block square, to mix lime that would set in a wet season, and to read the grain of a stone before the chisel touched it. Rochdale's quarries along the moor edge produced a hard, gritty sandstone that resisted the frost and blunted the tools, and the apprentice's first year was mostly spent at the grindstone. He grew quickly, with big hands and a habit of standing in front of a finished wall with his head tilted, as if it were a dog that might yet do something unexpected. His master said he had a good eye and a bad temper for haste. What he did not have was ambition. In 1511 his mother died, and the household came to depend on him. Quenild's death, in 1511 when Piers was eighteen and his sister seventeen, came in the middle of an ordinary winter and was recorded in the ledger as a hunt concluded. The details the family kept to themselves. It was a hard thing, but what came after it decided the shape of his life. Godfrey Danby was on the road more than at home and was not a man to be relied on with a house, and the two young people, still in the parish where their mother was buried, made the arrangement that lasted forty-seven years. Piers would keep his trade and provide the roof; Agnes would take in washing and keep the accounts. Neither ever married. His master, who had a sentimental streak that he hid under a scowl, let him work on part-time terms, and the term of his apprenticeship, interrupted and resumed and never quite completed, lingered on the roll of the Rochdale masons for the rest of his life. Nobody ever struck the name out. What kept him from being merely a stubborn craftsman was the use the family made of his skill. A mason knows where walls are thick and where they are hollow, where a cellar runs and what lies under a floor. When the Red Ledger's people needed to know whether a barn in the Rossendale hills had a second undercroft, or whether a church crypt had been bricked up, or where a passage might be found under a manor house, Piers was asked. He measured buildings from outside, by pacing and by the height of the windows, and he was rarely wrong. He also cut the small marks on stones that the Faulkners used to tell each other that a place was safe or otherwise, a shallow chevron on a doorpost, a notch on a lintel. His cadet branch had no glamour and few relatives, but it could tell you what was behind a wall. The Flodden campaign of 1513 took men from every northern parish, and Piers, twenty, marched north with the levy. He was not a soldier in any sense; he was a stout Rochdale lad with a bill, who came home in October with his boots in poor state and a firm opinion of northern weather. His father Godfrey died in 1520, on the road, of a chill caught driving cattle through a wet November, and was buried at Rochdale beside Quenild. The drovers of Blackstone Edge marked the day by driving a small mixed herd past the churchyard, a custom of theirs that Piers valued more than he could say. After Godfrey's death the house belonged to the two of them, and the two of them made the best of it. The years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown gave him plenty of work and plenty of thought. Rochdale church, like every parish church, was altered again and again: rood screens pulled down, altars stripped, images taken out and painted over, and then, under Queen Mary, some of them put back. Piers was called on to carve and to knock down, and did both with the same lack of comment. The dissolution of the monasteries brought a different kind of trade. Abbey stone was being sold off cheaply, and he spent years turning old monastic ashlar into barn walls and cottage gables, with a small private satisfaction that the stone of the fallen abbeys would keep sheep out of the wet. When the northern risings drew Lancashire men into the field in 1536 he stayed at home, being past forty and being unpersuaded, and kept the Faulkner papers dry in a wall cavity that he had built into the back of the cottage. He was tall, slow-speaking, and rather sad in the face until he smiled, at which point the sadness vanished as if it had been a coat. Neighbours remembered his hands and the tilt of his head, and children remembered that he carved them small animals out of leftover stone. In the spring of 1558, when he was sixty-five, he borrowed a cob to ride to a job at Halifax, an unusual thing for him since he had always gone on foot, and the horse put a foot wrong on the steep stony descent of Blackstone Edge. He fell, and died where he fell, of the injuries. Agnes brought him home on a hurdle. She survived him by only a few months. The Red Ledger lists Piers under the cadet Faulkners with a note that he was of use to the hunters as a builder. It does not add, though the family does, that the walls he built were as trustworthy as any tally. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the apprentice who never finished, and never needed to.