Quenild Chaloner

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

Bolton in 1629 was a town of bleachers, fustian weavers and chandlers, set on the little river Croal and hemmed in by moss and moorland, and Quenild Chaloner was born there that year into a household where the candle was a trade and the spindle was a calling. Her father, Alexander Chaloner, was a chandler who rendered tallow in a shed behind the house and sold dips and rushlights to half the street. Her mother, Mary Faulkner, was a spinster teacher, an unusual phrase for a married woman, and it meant that Mary had taught reading to the girls of Bolton in her own front room before her marriage and went on doing so afterward. In the hunting families she was known as The Rough Spindle, and she was a vampire slayer, though the neighbours knew her only as the woman who kept the dame school and whose pupils could all read the Bible by eight. Quenild was the only child. The house smelled of hot fat and wet wool, and the light in it was always candle-light, so that as a girl she could tell by the smell of a flame which batch of tallow had made it. She learned her letters at her mother's knee with a dozen other girls, and she learned early that Mary Faulkner had a way of vanishing on certain nights and returning in the morning with grass on her hem and a look of grim satisfaction. In time she was told the reason. Mary handed her the Red Ledger at fourteen, and Quenild read the tally from Hugh Faulkner's day to her mother's, and understood that she was heir to a long, orderly and dangerous business. She was not called, but she did not seem to mind. What she wanted, she said, was to be present when things were born, not when they were killed. That ambition led her to midwifery. In the seventeenth century a midwife was a woman of standing, licensed in principle by the bishop and in practice by her neighbours. She was expected to be sober, discreet, respectable and of good repute, to swear an oath not to conceal births or to practise sorcery, and to be able to baptise a dying infant if no minister could be found. Quenild served her apprenticeship under an older Bolton woman, learning to turn a child in the womb, to manage a difficult labour, and to tell by a mother's colour and pulse what would come. She was licensed in her twenties, and by thirty she was among the busiest midwives in south Lancashire, called out of bed at all hours to cottages, farmhouses and the great houses on the moor edge. She married in 1651, aged twenty-two, to Denys Shuttleworth, a cooper born in 1633 who was four years her junior. It was an unusual match in years, and the town said so, but Denys was a steady, cheerful man with a good trade, and he had known her since they were children. He made barrels for the brewers and the soap-boilers, and the sound of his adze was as familiar in the yard as the smell of her mother's tallow. They set up house near the market cross. The wedding was small, as such things were in the middle of the civil wars, when the Bolton streets still recalled the storming of the town by Prince Rupert's army in 1644 and the executions that followed. Quenild had been a girl of fifteen when it happened and had never quite forgotten the sound of the bells. Their children were Odelina Faulkner, born in 1654, and Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner, born in 1655. Both took the Faulkner name, as the family often arranged for the children of its daughters, though their father kept his own and passed on his Christian name and his surname to the boy as part of the clumsy but affectionate compound by which he was known. Quenild delivered neither of them alone, as was the custom, but she reserved the right to check the midwife's work. The children grew up in a house that was half a nursery and half a surgery, with a stream of anxious husbands at the door at midnight, and they learned early to bring the lantern and keep quiet. Mary Faulkner died in 1656, when Quenild was twenty-seven and her son barely a year old, and Alexander Chaloner lived on until 1665, the plague year. His daughter buried him and shut up the shop for a season, and the tallow went to a neighbour. What she kept from her mother's death was the Red Ledger's Bolton pages and a certain mission. Slayers came to her, in the manner of the trade, for their bruises and their cracked ribs, and she treated them without asking questions. A midwife was permitted to be out at night and to be seen with blood on her apron, and no one in Bolton thought twice. More than one Faulkner hunter of the district owed a mended arm to her, and the Red Ledger records a small, dry acknowledgement of her assistance in the margin of an entry for the winter of 1658. The most notable episode came in 1662, when a farmer's wife in the moss country beyond Horwich was in labour for two days and the household sent for the midwife in a panic. Quenild rode out through a rain-swollen night to find a house where the dogs would not enter and the husband had been seen at the well at midnight. What she found was not a difficult birth but a household in the grip of something worse, a vampire who had fastened on the farm and was feeding on the family a little at a time. She delivered the child, saw the mother safe, and then sent word by a stable boy to a Faulkner cousin who worked the moss. The hunter came the next night, and the entry in the Red Ledger records a kill, and a line beneath it in a different hand: the midwife's notice saved the household. The Faulkner and Proctor rivalry reached her in the form of a tale her mother had told: that the Yorkists would gladly claim a Lancashire kill if a Lancashire clerk misdated it. She was scrupulous about dates ever after, and her own records of births, which she kept for thirty years, were models of neatness. When the Glorious Revolution came in 1688 she was fifty-nine, and she observed that the country had changed its king without a single midwife being consulted. She continued to attend births, though the fells around Bolton grew harder on her knees. In 1692, at sixty-three, she was called to a remote farm in bad weather, and on the way home over the fell in the dusk she met with an accident on the steep path, a fall from which she did not recover. She was found the next morning and carried down. Denys Shuttleworth outlived her by twelve years, dying in 1704, and Odelina lived to 1727 and Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner to 1720. Quenild Chaloner is remembered as the midwife who caught two worlds in the same hands, the Bolton children she brought into the light and the Faulkner hunters she quietly patched up. In the Slayerverse she is a fine example of the women who served the work of the slayers by their competence, calm and discretion.