Tiffany Faulkner

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

There are three Saxon crosses in the churchyard at Whalley, and Tiffany Faulkner was taught as a child that they had been put there to keep the dead where they belonged. She never decided whether she believed it. She was born in Whalley in 1564, under the ruined walls of the abbey that had once been the richest house of Cistercian monks in Lancashire and was now a gentleman's residence and a quarry, and she grew up at the edge of a landscape in which the past was always physically present. Fallen arches stood in pasture. Monks' fishponds held frogs. Carved stones from the cloister turned up in the walls of pigsties. It was a country of wool farms, abbey lands and stone-walled moors, and the weather came in off Pendle Hill in a grey sheet that could last a week. Her father was Harry Rishton, a shepherd on the fells, born in 1539, and her mother was Nesta Faulkner, born in 1543, a carder of wool. Harry spent most of the year out on the high pasture with a dog, a crook and a bag of oatcake, moving the flock from the bottoms to the tops as the season allowed, and he came home in the evenings smelling of peat smoke and lanolin with his hands cracked like old leather. Nesta worked at home. All day she sat at the hearth with a pair of wool cards, wooden paddles set with iron teeth, combing the tangled fleece into soft rolls ready for the spinners, a task that filled the air with a fine white dust and left her with a permanent cough. She was a Faulkner by birth and by descent from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and though the line was thin in her generation she was proud of it in a private, stubborn way, and made sure her daughters knew whose blood they had. Tiffany was the elder of two. Her sister Blanche Rishton was born in 1566, and from the beginning the two were unlike. Tiffany was cautious, practical and slow to speak; Blanche was quick, bold and impatient. They shared a bed in the loft, a bench at the table and a wool blanket that Nesta had carded and woven, and they fought like cats and defended one another like wolves. It was Blanche who would become a vampire slayer, though Tiffany never called her that in later life, preferring to say that her sister kept the family business. The business, as the ledger has it, was the Red Ledger of the Faulkners, and it was Blanche who carried its entries. Tiffany's own trade was the dairy. At fifteen she was sent as a hired girl to a farm on the Ribble, a steading owned by a yeoman who held part of the old abbey grange and kept forty head of cattle, and there she learned the skills of milking, churning and cheese-making that would sustain her for the rest of her life. Lancashire cheese, crumbly and sharp, was made in these farmhouses in big flat rounds and carried to Preston and Clitheroe on packhorses. She grew to be a fine hand at it. She was a large, plain, deliberate woman with a slow smile and a reputation for never wasting a drop, and by her late twenties she was the head dairywoman on the farm, in charge of two maids and a boy. She did not marry. It was not for lack of offers. A carter from Blackburn courted her for two years, and a widower from Whalley village asked twice, but Tiffany turned them down, quietly and without offence, because she had decided that her place was elsewhere. Someone had to look after her parents, and someone had to keep the house in order for Blanche, who came and went at odd hours with mud on her boots and a look on her face. So Tiffany stayed, and she never regretted it, or said she did. She had a small savings, a small room and a great many nieces and nephews in the making, or so she expected, though in the event Blanche's life gave her only a few. The Armada summer of 1588 was when she first understood what her sister did. Beacons had been laid on the fells and men were posted to light them, and Blanche, then twenty-two, went out at night with a satchel and a lantern, saying she was going to look at the beacon at Pendle. She came back at dawn with blood on her sleeve and a flat expression, and Tiffany, who was twenty-four and not stupid, took one look at her and put a kettle on. She never asked. She only made sure there was always hot water, clean linen and a place to sleep, and that was her contribution to the work. She brought a salve of comfrey and goose grease for the cuts, and she learned to read a scab as well as any surgeon. The rivalry with the Proctors, the White Ledger keepers across the Pennines, was a background hum in her life. She had heard the story of Towton often enough to recite it, and she believed, in the loyal way of Lancashire folk, that the Guest had escaped through some Yorkshire negligence. But she also knew that her mother had once sold a pair of cards to a Yorkshire woman at Skipton market and found her a very civil customer. Tiffany's view, delivered over a cheese board and never in front of Blanche, was that a feud which required no one to be hurt was a feud for people with time on their hands. Her parents died a couple of years apart, Harry in 1603 and Nesta in 1605, and Tiffany buried them both from the house at Whalley. She went on working. She kept the dairy through the plague years and the hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, when cattle died on the moors and the price of oats climbed, and through the strange summer of 1612, when the Pendle assizes at Lancaster hanged ten people, several of whom she had known by sight. She was an aunt of sorts to half the parish, and it was in that role that she died. In 1621, when she was fifty-seven, she went to help at a neighbour's lying-in, as she had helped at a hundred others, and caught the childbed fever that was passing through the parish. She died of it within the week. She had borne no children of her own. She was buried at Whalley, near the crosses. Blanche stood at the grave and, according to the only surviving account, said nothing at all. The Slayerverse does not count Tiffany Faulkner among its hunters, but the Red Ledger notes her in a single marginal line beside the entry for her sister: kept the house, kept the fire, kept the faith.