Rebecca Faulkner

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

A hat, in the Ipswich of 1720, was a small declaration of who a woman intended to be, and Rebecca Faulkner made them for a living. Born in 1702 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, she trained herself into one of the more successful milliners on the north shore, and she died in 1772, aged 70, of a winter cough, having outlived her husband, her parents, and most of the women who had once queued in her front room for a fitting. Her name in the Red Ledger is entered under a single word, keeper, which the Faulkners used for people who held the house together while others went out into the dark. Her father was Alexander Sagar, a clerk born in 1671, who wrote a clean, quick hand and earned his bread by copying deeds, keeping the books of merchants, and drawing up wills for neighbours who did not trust their own spelling. He died in 1712, when Rebecca was ten. Her mother was Edith Tattersall Faulkner, born in 1667, a tavern keeper's daughter, and the mother had done what Faulkner women often did and kept the family name alongside her husband's for her children, so that the girl grew up a Faulkner in everything but her father's surname. Edith lived until 1740. From her Rebecca got a good head for the way a room behaves when people have been drinking in it, a wariness of men who arrive at closing time, and a broad, practical humour. From the clerk she got the sums, the neat copperplate and the habit of writing things down. She had one sibling, a brother named George Faulkner Sagar, born in 1698. He was no slayer, and the two children were left, after their father's death, in the care of a widow who had to earn money. Ipswich was then a town of about a hundred and fifty houses, lying along the river and the coast road, with a long, lively tradition of lace-making that had made the town's name known in Boston and beyond. The lace trade meant that girls were taught bobbin and needle very young, and Rebecca, at eight or nine, could already work a piece of edging without looking. Her mother was pleased and her brother was amused, and the widow's pennies were made to stretch. By fifteen she was apprenticed to a milliner, a woman who took in the finishing of hats, hoods, tippets and the ribbons and gloves that went with them. The trade was more than it sounds. A milliner imported much of her stock from London and Boston, and Rebecca learned to judge the quality of a silk by touch, to bargain with a shipmaster, and to make a customer feel like a person of standing while spending more than she had meant. The Faulkner kin, who had a nose for useful skills, noted that a milliner is a person to whom everyone speaks. Women told her about the rumours of the town while she pinned their headgear, and in a shop the talk is a kind of intelligence. She made a habit of remembering it. In 1720, at eighteen, she married Ephraim Cole, a young preacher of Newbury with a good voice and no pulpit. Their marriage was warm and unhurried. He was gone for weeks at a time on his circuit and she was left with the shop, the house and, before long, the children. Obadiah Faulkner Cole arrived in 1723, when she was twenty-one, and William Faulkner Cole in 1727. Obadiah lived until 1796, and William, who became a slayer, died in 1775. She raised both of them in a house that smelled of steam and straw, where the front room was a shop and the back room a kitchen, and where the shelves were lined with hat blocks that the boys were forbidden to touch and always did. The wars with France on the frontier shaped much of her middle years. Ipswich lay well back from the fighting, but its young men marched north with the militia, and its women learned to watch the post road for news. She sold black ribbon and crape more often than she would have liked. She also knew, from the Faulkner side of her life, that the periods of war and dislocation brought other troubles, since the ledger-keeping cousins had learned over centuries that vampires favour a country in disorder. Her house became a place where those cousins could sit down without remark. A slayer in from a long ride was simply a customer's husband waiting for a bonnet to be finished, and a whispered account was easy to conceal in the bustle of a shop. She was a canny, watchful woman, and the family later ascribed to her the invention of the simplest and most durable of their signalling devices. A particular ribbon in the shop window, tied in a particular way, meant that it was safe to call; another meant that it was not. The system was never written down in her lifetime, but it was in use for decades and it survived her by nearly a century. She also kept, as a clerk's daughter would, a private set of accounts on the side, in which she set down whatever the visiting Faulkners told her about the count of the Red Ledger. She did not hunt, and she never claimed to, but when her son William came to the calling she was the person who knew what to say to him. Her feelings about the rival house were mild. Faulkner women of her generation were more interested in the survival of the family than in the old grievance over Towton, and she treated the White Ledger as a matter of pride rather than passion. She was, however, always ready to defend the family name, and it is recorded that when a visiting Pennsylvania cousin of the Proctor line had sniffed at the standing of the Massachusetts Faulkners, Rebecca sold the woman a hat, explained its price in careful detail, and was thanked for her honesty. The story was repeated for years in both houses. Ephraim died in 1766, and she carried on alone in the shop for a further six winters. In the last of them a cold settled in her chest and would not leave. She died in 1772, aged 70, of what the family simply called the winter cough, and was buried in Ipswich beside the husband whose sermons she had helped copy. In the wider memory of the Slayerverse she is a reminder of how much of the Faulkner story was carried on by women who never held a rifle, and who did their work with pins, ribbon and a shopkeeper's ear for what people were not saying.