Verena Faulkner

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

The youngest child of a surveyor and a seamstress is apt to be watched by everyone and listened to by no one, and Verena Faulkner spent her childhood in Padiham, Lancashire, learning to make herself useful in the gaps. She was born in 1628, four years after her sister Winifred Faulkner, in a stone house at the top of a lane where the wind came straight off Pendle. Her father, Tristram Bellingham, was a surveyor who spent his days pacing out other people's land. Her mother, Florence Faulkner, was a seamstress by trade and, as the Red Ledger knew her, a vampire slayer called The Sure Ferryman. The child was told none of this until she was old enough to keep a secret, but she noticed, as children do, that her mother's needle was never far from her hand and that some nights the bed beside the chimney was empty. Padiham in Verena's childhood was a place of hand-looms. Almost every cottage in the valley had one, and the noise of them was the background of village life: the clack of the beater, the thump of the treadle, the hum of a spinning wheel from the next room. Wool from the Pennine flocks came in by pack-horse, and the cloth went out the same way to the markets at Burnley and Manchester. A girl was expected to learn a trade by twelve. Verena, small and patient and rather short-sighted, was set to the loom by a neighbour, a widow named in the family papers only as Mistress Hargreaves, and discovered that she loved it. There was something in the slow accumulation of a piece of cloth, thread by thread, that suited a temperament much given to noticing detail. The loom did not spare her the larger events of the time. She was fourteen when the civil wars began and seventeen when her father died, in 1645, the year the wars turned. Tristram Bellingham had been away on a survey for a Whalley landowner when he fell ill, and he was brought home too late. The household contracted. Winifred, four years the elder, was already courting the man she would marry, and Florence had her work at the needle and the Ledger. Verena found herself the daughter at home, and she took on that role without complaint, weaving in the day and reading by rushlight in the evening. It was in those evenings that her mother finally told her what the ledger was. She listened to the story as she would listen to a sermon, with her hands folded, and asked only one question. Was the tally kept honestly? Florence Faulkner said it was, so far as any human hand could keep it. Verena nodded and said that in that case she would like to help keep it. She was not called, and she knew she never would be, but she had a good hand and a good memory and a grim sort of patience. Over the following decade she made a fair copy of the Red Ledger in her own script, taking care over the spelling of names and the dating of entries, so that if the original was ever lost there would be a second record. The copy went into the false back of a chest, where the family kept things it did not want the parish to see. As a weaver she was competent and later more than that. By her thirties she wove a fine, close-set worsted that a Manchester factor was glad to buy, and she trained two girls from the village to work beside her. She was never married. The reasons, as far as anyone knew, were her own: she did not lack admirers, but she took a firm view that a woman with a loom, a house and a trade of her own had no need to entrust her earnings to a husband. She had a dry sense of humour, expressed in remarks so quietly delivered that people sometimes did not notice them until later. She was thin and upright and wore a grey linsey-woolsey gown, and the children of the village believed she could see through walls. The Restoration in 1660 meant less to the hand-loom weavers of Padiham than the price of wool, but she followed the gossip with interest. The Faulkner family had been Royalist in sentiment for the most part, or at least Lancastrian by habit, and the return of the King was greeted at the family table with a small glass of something stronger than ale. Verena drank hers and said nothing. She had a private opinion of kings, learned from a lifetime of watching cloth prices rise and fall with the temper of Whitehall. She did care, however, about her sister's death in 1665, when Winifred was thrown from a horse and killed on a stony track above the village. It was the great plague year, and the news was almost lost among the larger fears. Verena walked up to see the place herself, stood there a while, and came back and went on weaving. That loss, coupled with the plague fright and the age of her mother, turned Verena's last years inward. Florence Faulkner, the Sure Ferryman, was in her sixties and slowing down, and Verena took on more of the practical burden of the household. She managed the accounts, sold the cloth, and took over the correspondence with other Faulkner families in Lancashire. In 1666, a year after the plague and a year after her sister's death, a fever swept the valley, the kind the old people insisted on calling the sweating sickness, and Verena, who had spent the winter nursing neighbours, took it herself. She died within days, in 1666, aged thirty-eight, and was buried beside her father in the churchyard. Her mother, who had buried a husband and a daughter, buried the second daughter without a word and then, according to the family tradition, did not pick up her needle for a month. What Verena left was small but real. The fair copy of the Red Ledger she had made was later used by a Faulkner cousin to reconstruct entries damaged in a damp winter, and her corrections to several dates were accepted by the family as authoritative. She never faced a vampire, yet a tally is only as good as its copies, and hers were clean. Her weaving passed to the apprentices, and a length of her worsted was kept in the family chest for decades as a standard of what good cloth should feel like. In the family's memory she is the quiet sister, the one who stayed at home and worked while others rode out. The Faulkners recall her fondly, and the Proctors of Yorkshire, who eventually heard of her copy, are said to have admired its neatness. In the wider Slayerverse Verena Faulkner belongs with the record-keepers, those unglamorous figures whose steady work turned scattered notes into a lineage.