Winifred Faulkner

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

Padiham lies in a fold of the Calder where the hills of east Lancashire begin to climb toward Pendle, and in 1624 it was a village of hand-looms, stone cottages and steep lanes, where the sound of the shuttle carried from window to window in the evening. Winifred Faulkner was born there that year, the elder daughter of Tristram Bellingham, a surveyor, and Florence Faulkner, a seamstress. Her surname came through her mother, as Faulkner surnames often did, and she carried it with a certain stubborn pride all her life. It was a house of measurement and needlework: on one side of the table her father spread plans and ran a chain along them, and on the other her mother cut linen by the light of a rush. Tristram Bellingham was a practical man in a period when land was being measured as never before. Enclosure, boundary quarrels and the sale of monastic estates and gentry farms kept a surveyor busy in the north-west, and he was often away for days with his Gunter's chain, his staff and his plane table, walking the edges of other men's property. He was born in 1603 and he died in 1645, when Winifred was twenty-one, and he never grew rich, but he taught his daughters to reckon a field's area at a glance and to keep tidy account of what was owed. Florence Faulkner, born in 1604, ran the other side of the household. She was known in Padiham as a seamstress who could turn a bolt of coarse cloth into a decent shirt in a night, but the hunting families knew her under another name, The Sure Ferryman, for she was a vampire slayer, and a steady one, who ferried the stricken and the frightened out of danger and across the river to safety. That nickname was old in the family and came from work her grandmother had done at fords. Winifred grew up between those two vocations, and she saw both close at hand. She saw her father come home with mud to the knee and a page of figures, and her mother go out on nights when the moon was down and come back before dawn with her sewing basket in her hand as though nothing had happened. She was told the truth at about fourteen. It was done, the family said, with characteristic economy: her mother put the Red Ledger on the table beside the linen and said, this is the other half of what we do. Winifred read the Faulkner tally from Hugh Faulkner's first entry in 1455 to her mother's most recent, and was quiet for a long while. She then asked about the Guest, the vampire lost at Towton, and was told that Lancashire blamed Yorkshire and Yorkshire blamed Lancashire, and that nobody knew. That did not satisfy her, but it set her habit of asking the second question. She was not called. Whatever spark makes a slayer did not come to her, and she was frank about it, without bitterness. Her younger sister Verena Faulkner, born in 1628, took the loom. Winifred took the shop. She married a shopkeeper, a Lancashire tradesman with premises on a good corner of the market street, and from her twenties she was known as a shopkeeper's wife, which in a small town was a position of some standing. Her husband sold cloth, thread, candles, soap and the small necessaries of a household, and she ran the counter with him, kept the book, and dealt with the travelling pedlars who came up from Manchester and Burnley. There were no children of the marriage. The household was quiet and orderly, and the shop bell rang all day. She reached maturity at a hard time. The civil wars divided Lancashire from top to bottom. Some gentry families held for the King and others for Parliament, and the hand-loom villages, which lived on trade, were caught in the middle. The country around Padiham saw plundering, requisition and the passage of armies, and a shopkeeper who could not tell which side would win the next skirmish learned to sell to both and say little. Winifred's father died in 1645, the year the wars turned decisively, and she buried him with her mother and her sister and returned to the shop the next morning. She had a way of taking a grief and folding it small, like a piece of linen, and putting it out of sight. What she did for the Red Ledger she did across the counter. A village shop is a crossroads of gossip, and hers was no exception. Carters told her about ruined lanes, and farmers' wives told her about cattle found dry in the byre, and once, in a hard winter, a stranger bought a great deal of salt and garlic and would not say why. Winifred remembered such things and repeated them to her mother, who kept the Faulkner tally in its own careful fashion. Florence Faulkner lived until 1674, and for the last years of her hunting life her daughter's shop was one of the best sources of information she had. Winifred never carried a blade, but she carried a good memory, and it was said that a Lancashire hunter who wanted to know what was happening in the villages would go and buy a candle from Winifred. The rivalry with the Proctors of Yorkshire was, to her, an inherited sport. She knew the Yorkist families ran their own ledger, that they kept it as faithfully as the Faulkners kept theirs, and that they blamed her ancestors for the Guest. She took this in good humour. She liked the idea that somewhere on the far side of the Pennines a Proctor woman was also standing behind a counter, also listening, also writing things down. In her later years she sometimes sent a packet of Lancashire thread with a carrier bound for Halifax, with no note, as a kind of wordless greeting. Whether it was received she never learned, but the family repeated the story with affection. In the great plague year of 1665 Padiham was spared the worst, though the news from London made every household jumpy, and Winifred kept the shop shut for a fortnight and burned rosemary in the doorway. It was that same year, in a wet season, that she rode out on a hired horse to visit a sick relative in a farm above the village, and the animal slipped on a stony track and threw her. She died of the fall in 1665, aged forty-one, and was buried at Padiham. Verena, her only sister, took the news badly and did not speak of it for a year. Winifred Faulkner left no children, but she left a reputation as one of the sharpest ears in the Red Ledger's information network, a woman who never held a stake and yet supported the hunters who did. In the wider Slayerverse she stands among those quiet members of the Faulkner line whose work was done at a counter rather than a crossroads, and whose memory was preserved in the small marginal notes that her mother and the later keepers wrote in the ledger to remember her.