Sarah Bartlett Faulkner

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

Sarah Bartlett Faulkner was the sister who stayed. Born in 1757 at Worcester, Massachusetts, she grew up in a house where the mother was a hunter and the brother would become one, and where she alone showed no sign of the calling, and she chose to make that fact into a vocation of its own. She was a dairywoman by trade, a Faulkner of the Lancastrian side that kept the Red Ledger, and a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486. She never married and had no children, and for sixty-nine years she kept a household, a herd and a family's peace of mind. Her father, Caleb Bartlett, born in 1729, was a blacksmith, and Worcester in the 1750s and 1760s was a country town on the great post road between Boston and Springfield, all taverns, teamsters and the noise of iron. The forge stood beside the road, and Sarah grew up with the clang of the hammer as a background to her days, the smell of hot scale and horse hoof, and a steady stream of travellers stopping to have a tyre reset or a shoe put on. Her mother, Patience Faulkner, born in 1724, was a dairywoman, and also, in the family's private language, a slayer known as The Wild Yoke. The name came from the way she was said to drive a team of oxen in the dark, lurching, shouting and seemingly out of control, straight at whatever had crossed her field, and it was not a compliment that she ever objected to. Sarah's brother Caleb Bartlett Faulkner was born in 1758, a year after her, and grew up to be a printer and a slayer in his own right. It was an unusual household in which to be the ordinary child. Patience taught her daughter to milk, to skim and to make cheese, and she taught her son to shoot, and neither child was left in doubt about which lessons mattered more to whom. But Sarah, who noticed everything, understood early that the dairy and the forge were not simply places of work. They were the base of an operation. Her mother's herd was kept on hill pasture above the town, which the family called the fells in the Lancashire fashion, and it gave Patience a reason to be out on the hills at dusk, to know every gully, and to carry a heavy stick and a long knife without comment. Sarah, from about eleven, went with her. She was a plain, capable and rather formidable girl, tall like her father, with a straight nose, a habit of pursing her lips before speaking, and a strong sense of what was owed. The Worcester of her youth was a town of some importance in the politics of the coming war: its committee of correspondence was among the most active in the province, and in 1774 the courthouse was surrounded by armed men who forced the King's judges to resign. Sarah, seventeen that year, watched the crowd from the tavern steps with her brother and understood, as everyone did, that ordinary life was about to change. When the war came, she remained in the dairy while the men of the town went to the militia. The years from 1775 to 1783 were the hardest of her mother's life and, in a different way, of hers. Prices ran wild, the currency collapsed, and the dairy became a place where hunters, soldiers and the occasional deserter were fed. Sarah learned what the ledger meant by lodging: a sound loft, a fire, and a rule that no one would be asked their business. Her father Caleb Bartlett died in 1785, and her mother Patience followed in 1784, just before him, so that the household lost both of its heads within a year of each other. That was the turning point of her life. She was twenty-eight, unmarried, with a house, a dairy, and a younger brother, Caleb, who had left for Salem Town to learn printing and whose hunting life lay elsewhere. Some in the town expected her to marry quickly, for a woman of her age with a farm was a desirable match. She declined. She did not say why, and various explanations were offered by relatives, among them that she had been disappointed young, or that she thought marriage a poor bargain for a woman who could manage her own affairs. What she said, when pressed, was that someone had to keep the place, and it might as well be her. She kept it well. Through the 1780s and 1790s she expanded the herd, bought a second parcel of hill pasture, and developed a reputation for hard, dry, well-pressed cheese that travelled well and sold in Boston. Her books were meticulous. She kept the old ledger custom of the non-hunting house, a record of who had been fed and lodged and when, and she passed the entries on to the Red Ledger's keepers whenever a rider came through. When her brother began to hunt in earnest in the late 1780s, she was his supply line and his safe house, and he wrote to her regularly from Salem and from wherever else his work took him. The rivalry with the Proctors, in the abstract, amused her. She regarded the whole business of the two ledgers, and of the Guest who had escaped at Towton in 1461, as something men had made a great deal of, though she kept the Faulkner side of it faithfully. She once told a visiting cousin that the Yorkists were welcome to their tally so long as they kept off her pasture. She lived long, and the fells that had been her mother's ground became hers. She died in 1826, aged sixty-nine, of an accident on those hills. She had gone up in the early morning, as she had gone up a thousand times, to check the herd after a night of heavy rain, and the ground gave way under her on a slope she knew perfectly. She was found by a hired man before noon. Her brother had died in 1797, so she had outlived him by nearly three decades, and she was buried beside her parents. In the Slayerverse, Sarah Bartlett Faulkner is remembered as the unmarried dairywoman of Worcester, the daughter of one hunter and the sister of another, whose steadiness kept a whole line of them fed. The Red Ledger has no tally in her name, but the margin beside her entry carries a single line in a later hand: she kept the place.