Stuart Faulkner

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

On the night Stuart Faulkner was born in 1639, the tallow in the chandler's yard at Clitheroe was still being rendered, or so the joke went in later years, since he spent his whole life within reach of a smell of fat and wax. He was born in the small market town beneath its limestone castle in the Ribble valley of Lancashire, the second child of Stuart Thorne, born in 1615, a yeoman who worked a few fields on the edge of the town, and of Millicent Faulkner, born in 1612, a dressmaker whose family name he carried. The Thorne father and the Faulkner mother had joined two houses in the ordinary way of the north, and the boy grew up a little of both, with his father's slow, weather-reading patience and his mother's quick eye for a flaw in a seam. His elder sister was Prudence Faulkner, born in 1637, and she was his protector and his correspondent for as long as they both lived. He was three when the civil wars began. Clitheroe, with its Norman keep on the crag, changed hands and garrisons in a confusing way, and the family remembered that the yeoman father learned to bury his coin in the byre and to say very little to anyone in a uniform. The boy grew up in the quiet after the storm, in the Commonwealth years when the maypoles were down and the alehouses watched, and he was twenty-one when the king returned in 1660. By then he had learned his trade. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a chandler in the town, a dry, exacting man who made tallow dips, rush lights and the better wax tapers, and who taught him to render fat without scorching it, to plait a wick, to judge a mould and to keep a tally of the candles sold to each house. It was, he came to feel, a trade that suited a man who liked to know what was going on, since a chandler sold light to every household in town and saw every house at its evening business. In 1660 he married Shona Thorne, a dressmaker from Bellingham in Northumberland, the daughter of a chandler, Ian Thorne, and she was six years his senior, a tall silent woman with a reputation for unerring stitches. They met in the way of the trade, over the quality of a wick, and the marriage was one of the quietly satisfying ones. The couple lived over the shop in the market street, with the boiling room at the back and the work bench at the front, and between them they supplied half the town with light and the other half with gowns. Stuart was not a slayer, and he made no pretence to the calling. He was a Faulkner, and he knew the Red Ledger existed, and he understood that his wife's kin from the north were of another sort of Thorne than the farming kind. The rest of it he accepted with the mildness of a man who had decided long before that some questions were better not asked at the supper table. His usefulness to the hunters was of the plainest kind, and it was considerable. A vampire slayer of the seventeenth century worked in the dark, and light, in a country without street lamps or gas, was the thing that mattered. Stuart made the slow, tall tapers that would burn a full winter night, the lanterns' horn-paned candles that did not gutter in a gale, and a special pitch-dipped torch that would burn wet. He kept a stock behind the counter for the cousins who came through at odd hours, and he never raised his eyebrows at the quantity. In the ledger of a hunter cousin of the 1670s there is a line acknowledging a dozen candles from the chandler at Clitheroe, without charge, for the watch at the ford. It was the sort of gift that made a hunt possible, and it went unrecorded in most of the tallies. Their daughter Mercy Thorne Faulkner was born in 1663 and their son Gervase Thorne Faulkner in 1666, and the great plague year fell between them, when the shop stood half empty, the market was closed at the boundary stones and neighbours passed goods on the end of a pole. Stuart came through the year by the plain rule of keeping the shop shut and his family indoors, and he gave the credit for their survival to his wife, who had fumigated every room with vinegar and burned the sick-room cloths herself. Mercy grew up her mother's daughter, quick with a needle, and Gervase grew up his father's, watchful and quiet, and the family saw with a certain grim readiness that the boy was likely to be called. When the calling came, and Gervase became a vampire slayer, Stuart did not argue. He made the boy a pair of lanterns and told him to keep the wicks trimmed. The winter of 1682 was the hardest of his life. Shona, who had never been robust, caught a chill in January that settled on her chest, and she died that year, aged forty-nine, of the winter cough. Stuart was forty-three. He closed the shop for a week and then, to the surprise of the town, reopened it, working in silence at the moulds with the tallow steaming in front of him. His sister Prudence came from Burnley and kept the house, and Mercy took over the sewing. In 1688 his father, Stuart Thorne, died at seventy-three, and Stuart the younger, now the head of the family, found himself an orphan and a widower in the same decade. The Glorious Revolution of that year passed over him with little comment; he remarked to a customer that a candle burned the same whoever was on the throne. He grew old at Clitheroe, a spare, stooped figure with hands permanently stained from the fat, and he became something of a local fixture: the chandler who knew the whole town by the size of its order. He watched Gervase go about the family business and Mercy raise a household of her own, and he kept the Red Ledger's supply of light going into the eighteenth century. In his last years he lost his sister's company and his son's, for Gervase died in 1712 and Prudence in 1713, and it was said that the old man took each blow with the same steady look he gave to a guttering flame. Mercy died in 1714, and Stuart, by then a very old man, was already gone. He died in 1706, aged sixty-seven, of the winter cough that had taken his wife. The family's verdict on him was that he never held a stake and never wrote a tally, and yet that the Red Ledger had his fingerprints on nearly every night's work. In the stories told in the Slayerverse, he is the chandler who kept the lamps lit, a man who did not need a craft to make a hunter's night possible.