Abigail Hutchinson

Spouse of John Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Abigail Hutchinson was born in 1730 in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a farming household on the hill road above the town, where the ground rose in long ledges of pasture and stone and the wind came in hard off the ridge. The surviving family record names no parents for her, only the farm and the surname, and it says that she was raised among a crowd of cousins and hired hands in a house that valued work above talk. The Hutchinsons were Congregationalists of the plain, hardworking sort, and Abigail grew up on a regime of early rising, cold water, salt pork and Sunday sermons that lasted the better part of two hours. She learned to milk at six, to churn at seven and to keep a tally of eggs at eight, and by twelve she was doing the accounts of the dairy in a small firm hand. It was a talent that her father noticed and her mother, in a mild way, resented. The Northampton of her childhood was a market and meetinghouse town on the Connecticut, with about a thousand inhabitants, a courthouse, a few taverns and a ferry. The great revival led by Jonathan Edwards had swept through it in 1734 and 1735 when she was a child, and the memory of that season, of sobbing in the meetinghouse and neighbours confessing in the road, lay over the town for years. Abigail was small enough at the time to be frightened more by the noise than moved by the message, and in later life she was notably unexcitable about religion, going to meeting every Sunday and reading her Bible with a practical eye. The wars with France cast a longer shadow. Every summer or two brought rumours of raids on the northern settlements, and the militia drilled on the green with an uneasy earnestness. She was a tall, level-eyed girl with brown hair, strong hands and a quick, dry humour that took people by surprise. She could card wool, spin flax, make soap and candles, salt down a pig, bake bread in a brick oven and reckon a yard of linen against the price of butter, and she was as handy with a hoe as with a needle. Those were the accomplishments that a farmer looked for in a wife, and at eighteen she had several suitors. She chose John Faulkner, a young farmer of Northampton a few years her senior, whose father Denys had been a wheelwright and, though Abigail did not know it then, a hunter of a particular and secret kind. They married in 1748. The ceremony took place in the meetinghouse, followed by a supper in her father's kitchen with cider, boiled beef and a wedding cake of dried apples and rye. John's sister Patience, tall and watchful and a good deal more formidable than Abigail had expected, gave the bride a length of good linen and a look that lasted a fraction too long. It was a look, Abigail decided later, of assessment. Patience was working out whether the new wife could be trusted with a family matter, and Abigail, who had a sharp eye of her own, was quietly working out the same thing about the Faulkners. She learned the truth gradually, and in her own way. There were the absences at night, the barred cellar door, the silver in a drawer that could not have been a farmer's usual property, the unexplained wounds on his sister's hands. She said nothing for over a year. When she did raise the matter it was over the kitchen table, with a pan of bread dough between her hands, and she said plainly that she would prefer to know what she was living beside. John, who was not a hunter himself and never wished to be, told her what he knew, which was the story of the Red Ledger, the old rivalry with the Proctors in the Wars of the Roses, the vampire that got away at Towton in 1461, and the fact that his sister and, before her, his father had taken the family's task upon themselves. Abigail listened, thought about it for a day, and then made a decision that shaped the rest of her life. She would keep the farm running, feed whoever turned up at the door, and keep her mouth shut. The farm was her province. She managed the dairy, the poultry, the kitchen garden and the household economy with a competence that John frankly admired, and the Faulkner holding on the Northampton road prospered under her hand. She kept a household in which the door was always barred at dusk and always opened at dawn, in which a slayer arriving wounded at three in the morning could be fed, stitched and bedded down without a question, and in which no visitor ever reported anything unusual. In the family's own memory she is credited, more than any other in-law, with making the farm a safe house, a fixed point in the country where hunters could rest. The neighbours took her for a hard-working, hospitable, slightly stern farmer's wife, and she was content with the description. Her sons were the centre of her attention. Jonathan Faulkner, born in 1749, a year after the wedding, was a dark, watchful child who reminded her of his aunt, and she recognised early that he would follow the family road. She did not fight it. She fed him, sewed for him and argued with him about coming in to supper, and she set a place for his aunt Patience at the table whenever the hunt allowed. John Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1752, was a different child, plump, sunny and easily pleased, who took to the farm as a duck takes to a pond. She was privately relieved that one of her sons had no calling and would live to a quiet old age tilling the same fields. That relief was not entirely fulfilled, since he died in 1798, but he lived a full farming life. In 1769 the plague came to Northampton. It arrived in the late winter, carried, as such things usually were, by a traveller, and it moved through the hill farms with the swift arbitrariness of its kind. Abigail took it after nursing a neighbour's child, and she died within days, aged thirty-nine. John nursed her and buried her, and his sister Patience came over with food and sat quietly with him for several evenings. Her sons were twenty and seventeen, old enough to grieve and to work, and the farm went on. The household, though, was never quite the same. She left no ledger entry, no alias and no tally, since she was never a hunter. But the Red Ledger's keepers of the next generation noted that the Hutchinson farm wife had held the family's Northampton base together for twenty-one years. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the woman who kept the door on the latch and the bread in the oven, whose steady, unremarkable hospitality was one of the reasons the Faulkner hunters came home.