Judith Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Long Fowler. Craft: Falcon's Eye.

Judith Faulkner was born in 1639 in Haslingden, a stone-built hill town in the Rossendale valley of Lancashire, where the moorland comes down to the back doors and the streams ran brown with the dye of the fulling mills. Her father was Richard Marsden, born in 1612, a cooper who made barrels for the local brewers and the wool merchants, and her mother was Anne Faulkner, born in 1615, a woman of unusual accomplishments who worked as a herbalist and a physician's assistant in a besieged household. The detail comes from the Faulkner papers, which mention it with some pride: during the civil wars Anne had been shut up with a Royalist family in a manor under siege, and had spent weeks compounding poultices, dressing wounds and boiling water, learning in that hard school what the body could survive. It was from her mother, and from that time, that Judith took her name and her steadiness under fire. Judith grew up among the sound of coopers' adzes and the smell of herbs drying from the rafters. Her father's trade meant that the yard was full of staves and hoops, and she learned as a child to judge a barrel's tightness by the ring of it. Her mother's trade meant that the kitchen shelves were lined with jars of comfrey, feverfew and yarrow, and that neighbours came to the door with children who had burns or coughs. It was a house of two crafts and two temperaments, the cooper's patience and the herbalist's watchfulness, and Judith absorbed both. She had, by all accounts, extraordinary eyesight, and it was a family story that she could count the pigeons on a distant barn roof at the age of six. She was a sharp, quiet girl with a long neck and long fingers, and the younger children in the street called her the heron. She was apprenticed as a seamstress at fourteen to a woman in Bury, and it proved a trade well suited to her. A seamstress in the seventeenth century went into other people's houses, sat for hours in the light of a window, and heard everything that was said in front of her by people who assumed a sewing woman did not listen. Judith listened. She learned which gentleman was in debt, which lady was receiving letters in secret, which servant was carrying tales, and she learned to remember it all without writing anything down. It was a training that no hunting master could have designed, and it prepared her for the work she would later do. She never married. The family records mention a suitor in her twenties, a farrier, and say that she declined him with kindness and firmness, having by then decided that the life she wanted did not include a second household to run. Her brothers and sister came after her: Josiah Faulkner, born in 1646, and Helen Faulkner, born in 1654, both of whom would become slayers. But Judith's own calling did not come in the family way, through a mentor or a cellar. It came in the winter of 1669, when she was thirty, after a fever that took everyone in a household except one. She had been sent to sit with a sick family in a lonely farmhouse above the town, as her mother had done for others, and she arrived to find the master, the mistress and three children dying within a week of each other of what the neighbours called a winter fever. One child survived, a girl of six, and it was Judith who nursed her, and Judith who noticed the marks at the throat of the youngest of the dead, and the way the window had been opened from the outside. What she found waiting the next night, sitting in the corner of that stripped kitchen, she never fully described. She came home with the girl in her arms and the pistol of the dead master in her belt, and she was, from that morning, a vampire slayer. The alias the ledger gives her is The Long Fowler, and it reflects her craft. In the Spy's fashion she hunted by information, not by force, and her craft, Falcon's Eye, was the gift of seeing what others overlooked: the wrong footprint at a gate, the shutter that had been opened on the wrong side, the servant who was too willing to say all was well. She combined her seamstress's access to great houses with her mother's knowledge of fevers, and she could tell a real sickness from the counterfeit that a vampire's victims sometimes wore. Her gear was a flintlock pistol and a supply of hawthorn stakes, carried in a needle case she had adapted, with the stakes lashed inside a roll of linen among the pins and thread. A seamstress with a bag over her arm was invisible on any road in Lancashire, and she used that invisibility with great skill. The ledger records her as a hunter of the long game. She would take a commission for a gown in a house where something was wrong, and stay a fortnight, and leave with the thing's habits mapped to the hour. Then she would pass the information to her brother Josiah or her sister Helen, who did the close work, or she would do it herself with the cool, unhurried economy that gave her the name of the fowler, the one who waits by the mere for the bird to come in. Her tally was smaller than that of the fighting hunters, but the Red Ledger notes that her entries were almost always of the difficult ones, the creatures who had lived among people for years without being noticed. The Faulkner cousins agreed that she had a genius for the invisible, and the rival Proctors, reading the summary in a comparison of ledgers in the 1680s, are said to have remarked that the Long Fowler was the only Lancastrian they would have liked on their own side. The years passed through the great plague year and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which she followed with keen interest, since a change of king meant a change of servants and a reshuffle of every great house in the county. Her father died in 1684, aged seventy-two, and her mother Anne in 1690, in the same year as her daughter, an unhappy coincidence. Judith's own end came in 1690, on a lonely road on the Rossendale moors, in an ambush. The Red Ledger says only that she had been carrying word to a cousin and that the thing she had been tracking learned she was tracking it. She was fifty-one. Her brother Josiah found the bag at the roadside, the needles and thread still in it. She is remembered in the Faulkner accounts as the hunter who made no noise, and in the Slayerverse the phrase Falcon's Eye is still used of anyone who sees the small wrong thing in a room. Her thimble, the family says, is kept in the Red Ledger's box.