Abigail Jewett Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Long Quill. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Abigail Jewett Faulkner was born in 1837 in Concord, Massachusetts, and lived forty-nine years as a milliner and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the mill towns and harbours of New England. The family book knows her as The Long Quill, a name that recalls both the long plume that she wore in her own hats and the long pen in which she wrote her warnings, and it classes her as a Hunter, which in the Faulkner sense means a slayer who fixes on one quarry and does not leave the trail until the business is finished. Her craft was Beacon Reading, the interpretation of signal lamps, fires and other lights set to warn or to call, which she learned from her mother. She was the elder child of the carpenter Homer Jewett and of the seamstress and slayer Anna Faulkner, The Fallow Tinder, and the sister of the slayer Elias Jewett Faulkner. She married the printer Joseph Knight in 1861, raised two daughters, Abigail Knight and Alice Faulkner, both of whom became slayers, and died in 1886 of an old wound that never closed, aged forty-nine. She was born at Concord by the same accident of the calendar that had brought her mother into the world there twenty-two years before. Anna, who lived in a small house by the harbour at Marblehead and was in the last weeks of her first pregnancy, had gone inland in the spring of 1837 to the Concord shop of her cousin Naomi Adams Faulkner, The Slow Lantern, to rest and to be near a midwife whom the family trusted. The baby came a few days early, in the room above the shop, on a bright cold morning with the apple trees not yet in leaf. Naomi, who had been present at the birth of the mother, remarked that the Faulkners seemed to have settled on the place. Homer arrived by the evening stage with a cradle he had made on the road in his head, and had to be told that the baby would in fact be carried home in a basket. She was called Abigail for her great-grandmother, the boarding-house keeper of Newburyport, and was an observant, rather solemn infant with her mother's dark brows and a fixed, patient gaze. She grew up in Marblehead, in the house with the shutters, among hooks, lanterns, pots of pins and a great many small wooden boxes, and she had an unusual childhood for a girl of a fishing town. By the time that she was six she had been taught to put a lantern in a window at a certain hour, and had been told, in the tone that her mother used for the multiplication table, that it would be wrong to ask who it was for. She learned to hem at seven, to cut a pattern at nine and to block a hat at twelve. She had a sharp mind for shapes. She looked at a face and saw at once what sort of hat it needed, and she looked at a street, in the same way, and saw what sort of lamp. It was a gift that her mother recognised early and set about disciplining, since a child with good eyes and no instruction, Anna said, was like a house with windows and no roof. She was taught the lore without being called to it. Her father Homer made her a box. Her mother taught her to read the lights of the harbour, the riding lamps of the schooners, the lanterns on the wharves, the glow of the chandlers' shops, the watchfire of the night fishermen on the ledges, and to tell from the pattern of them where something was wrong. The Ledger at that time had few readers of lamps. A cousin at Gloucester, a cousin at Salem and her mother, in Marblehead, made up nearly all of the company, and Anna, who knew her own limits, was glad to have a daughter who could do the work. By sixteen Abigail could sit on the roof of the house for an hour with a spyglass and say what every lit window on the waterfront meant. She could not have said why she did not yet feel herself a slayer. She said it was like owning a very good hat that had not been asked for. The apprenticeship in millinery was taken at fifteen, in a shop in Salem, with a stern Frenchwoman who taught her to work in straw, felt and silk and who discovered almost at once that her apprentice could be left alone with a customer and trusted to get the money. By nineteen she had a bench of her own in Newburyport. She was a small, straight, dark-haired young woman with a long nose, a steady voice and a habit of tilting her head when she listened, and she sold hats to the wives of shipmasters, to the daughters of the mill owners and to the girls of the mill floors, who saved a month to buy a Sunday bonnet. She was a reliable, inventive, rather strict milliner. She could not bear a badly set feather, and she would not sell a woman a hat that did not suit her. Joseph Knight came into her shop in the spring of 1860 to deliver a proof. He was a printer from Deerfield, at the time a compositor on a newspaper in Newburyport, a slight, fair, rather shy young man with a lame left leg from a fall on the ice as a boy, and the newspaper had taken an advertisement from her for a new line of spring hats. It was set, he said, in an ugly face, and he wished to know whether she would like it reset. She looked at the proof. She said that it was the ugliest advertisement she had ever seen, and she asked him to do it again, in any type he liked. He brought the new one the next week, with an ornamental border in the shape of a bonnet. They were married in the church on the green at Newburyport in 1861, in June, and moved into rooms over the shop, where his type cases and her hat blocks shared a wall. She told him what she was on the night before the wedding, as the Faulkner women did. It took her some time, in the dark of the shop, between the hat stands, and she did it in the flat, plain voice in which she sold a hat. He listened, looked at his hands and said that he was a printer, and that in his experience there were a good many things that people did not like to put into print. He asked if she would want them printed. She said that she would. The Ledger's North Shore cousins found from that autumn that they had a press. Her daughters came in the next years. Abigail Knight was born in 1862 and lived until 1931, and Alice Faulkner was born in 1866 and lived until 1928. The elder was given her father's name, and the younger, whose christening Abigail attended in a state of some irritation, was entered in the register under her mother's. Joseph, asked about it, said that the register was hers. The Civil War, which had broken out in the month of their wedding, took much of the town's young male population away, and Joseph, who was lame, stayed at the case, printing regimental lists, sermons, the death notices of the dead and, at night, in the back of the shop, the small cards of the Ledger. Her brother Elias, who had been called in 1863 and was by then in Virginia as a scout, wrote to her whenever he could. The letters were short, in a type of his own devising, and she kept them all in a hatbox. The calling came to her in 1867, at thirty, in a churchyard at night. She was walking home from a customer's house, where she had been sitting up with a dying child, along the old burying ground beside the meetinghouse, in a cold November fog. She saw, from the lane, a lantern moving between the stones. She watched it for some time. It went from grave to grave in a manner that she did not like, and stopped at the newest, and she went up to the porch of the meetinghouse and pulled the bell rope, hard, to rouse the sexton. The bell rang out, loud and clear, across the stones. And something, out among them, answered. It was not a voice, she said afterward. It was a stroke, a single clean note, exactly like the second note of a bell, that came from under the ground. She stood on the porch with her hand on the rope for the longest minute of her life. Then she understood that she had been hearing that note, in one form or another, all her childhood. She went home, woke her mother, and said that she had been a fool for ten years. Beacon Reading was her craft and she refined it to an instrument. She set lamps. She set them in windows, on wharves, on the ledges and in church towers, at chosen hours, and she watched, from a dark place, what came to look at them. She kept a notebook of sightings in a small, upright hand, a record of where a light had been answered and where it had been ignored, and from this she could say where a thing was and, more to the point, where it would be. As a Hunter, she did not leave a trail when she found one. She followed it for as long as it took. She was a milliner by day and in the evenings she went out with a lantern in a hat box and a revolver in her reticule, and her gear was that revolver and silver-cast shot and a long steel hatpin that she was said to have used more often than either. She was credited with some thirty vampires in sixteen years, and of these she took a good many on the wharves of Newburyport, in the dead hours of a winter's night, after a lamp had been left alight for a week. Her brother's death, in the autumn of 1865, had been before her calling. The wound of her own came in 1871, in the hold of a schooner at the harbour, where she had followed a quarry for three weeks, and it was deep and low under the ribs. It healed on the surface and never closed within. She was forty before she would admit it to anyone, and by forty-five she would sit in the shop with her hand against her side and say that it was the damp. Joseph died in 1883, of a stroke, at forty-four, at his case, with the type still in his hand, and she hunted no more after that. She sold hats for three more years, in black, at the bench, and taught her daughters the lamp and the lore in the evenings. She died in the winter of 1886, in her own bed, with both girls beside her and, at her own request, a lantern lit in the window. Abigail Jewett Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Long Quill, the milliner of Newburyport, the hunter who read the lamps. In the Slayerverse she stands for the lamp-keepers of the Red Ledger, the women who understood that a light is a question put to the dark, and who stayed at the window long enough to hear the answer.