Prudence Faulkner

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

Prudence Faulkner was born in 1637 in Padiham, Lancashire, a small weaving town on the Calder below Pendle Hill, where the streets were narrow, the cottages were stone and the sound of the hand looms carried across the valley on a still morning. Her father was Stuart Thorne, born in 1615, a yeoman who held a modest farm on the edge of the town and who came, through the Thorne house, of a line of northern hill-farmers. Her mother was Millicent Faulkner, born in 1612, a dressmaker whose name the child took, in keeping with the family custom that let the surname travel down through the women when the line required it. That is the reason the record gives her as a Faulkner though her father was a Thorne, and it is a nice illustration of how the two houses had long since become tangled. Her younger brother, Stuart Faulkner, was born in 1639, and the pair were close all their lives. The household was a practical one. The farm gave oats, milk and a few beasts; Millicent's needle gave the coin. The child grew up between the byre and the sewing table, learning to skim cream, to salt bacon, to card wool and to turn a hem, and she picked up the Lancashire habit of watching the weather from the doorstep. Padiham was a place with a reputation, since the Pendle witches had been tried at Lancaster only twenty-five years before her birth, and the neighbours still talked about them with lowered voices. Prudence heard the tales at the fireside and learned early that fear could be a kind of currency. Her mother, who knew the family's other business, told her with a certain dryness that there were real things to be afraid of, and that the people in the stories were the least of them. She was five when the civil wars began and a girl of eleven when the second war broke out, and the Lancashire of her childhood was a country of shifting garrisons and stripped barns. In 1648 the Scots came south to fight at Preston, and the farms of the Ribble valley saw the marching columns; the family hid their grain under a false floor and their best cow in the wood. Prudence remembered it as a summer when the roads were full of strangers and her father slept with a fowling piece across his knees. The lesson she drew, and repeated all her life, was that a household survives on foresight, and that whoever keeps the keys keeps the family. It was a lesson that shaped her whole career. She never married. The family accounts are matter of fact about it: she had no wish to, and no one was foolish enough to press her. In her twenties she entered service as a housekeeper in a gentleman's house near Burnley, and in time she moved to larger and better households, managing the still room, the linen and the servants with a firmness that was admired and a little feared. She wore a bunch of keys at her belt that could be heard coming down a passage, and she kept a account book in a neat, upright hand in which every farthing was accounted for. Her employers valued her because she was honest, and her fellow servants valued her because she was fair. She had a dry wit, a strong opinion on the proper way to salt a ham, and a habit of saying nothing when she disapproved, which was more effective than shouting. Her mother died in 1663, when Prudence was twenty-six, and the household broke up around her. Her brother Stuart, then twenty-four, had lately married Shona Thorne and set up as a chandler in Clitheroe, and Prudence became for the young family the reliable aunt, the one who arrived with a ham when a child was born and stayed a week to run the house. She was present at the birth of Mercy Thorne Faulkner in 1663 and again at that of Gervase Thorne Faulkner in 1666, and she was a comfort to both children. Her father, Stuart Thorne, lived on until 1688, and in his last years Prudence kept his house, nursing him through the long decline with the same patience she gave to every other charge. She did not hunt. She had not been called, and she never claimed a craft, an alias or a tally. But she was a Faulkner and a Thorne, and she knew what her kin did, and her contribution was of the household kind. In the great houses where she served she kept the cellar keys, and she noticed things: a servant who took to sleeping by day, a stranger seen twice on the drive at dusk, a well-stocked larder that was found untouched after a family had left in a hurry. She wrote her observations in a private book, and when a cousin from the hunting line passed through, she handed him a page. Several Red Ledger entries of the 1660s and 1670s acknowledge, in their small print, information from a housekeeper at Burnley, and this is Prudence. She was, in effect, a listening post, an intelligencer whose rooms had ears, and the ledger holders quietly relied on her. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 came when she was fifty-one, and she took it, like everything else, in her stride. Her employers were divided, one branch of the family cleaving to the old king and one welcoming the new, and she kept the peace at the dinner table by the simple method of seating the disputants at opposite ends. She lived through the great plague year of 1665 in a locked house near Burnley and learned to fumigate a hall with juniper and to receive the baker's bread through a window. She outlived her brother's wife by thirty-one years and her brother by seven, dying in 1713 at the age of seventy-six of the sweating sickness, a fever that the old people in the district still called by that Tudor name, and that struck her down in a week. She was buried at Padiham beside her parents. Prudence is remembered as the unmarried aunt who kept the family together, and her keys, according to the Faulkner accounts, passed to her niece Mercy. In the Slayerverse she stands for the network of quiet observers who supplied the hunters with what they needed to know, and the phrase the family used for her was that she never missed a footstep in a house she kept.