Abigail Knight

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Bright Kestrel. Craft: Falcon's Eye.

Abigail Knight was born in 1862 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and lived sixty-nine years as a typist in the mill towns and harbours of New England, and for the last thirty-eight of them as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Bright Kestrel, a name taken from the small hawk that hangs motionless over a field and sees a mouse move at two hundred yards. She was 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, and her craft was Falcon's Eye, the art of seeing the one wrong thing in a crowded scene and holding it in view. Her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the elder daughter of the printer Joseph Knight and of the milliner and vampire slayer Abigail Jewett Faulkner, The Long Quill, and the sister of Alice Faulkner. In 1884 she married the machinist Walter Harlan, and they had two daughters, Effie Harlan Faulkner and Catherine Faulkner Harlan, neither of whom was called. She died in 1931 of heart failure, aged sixty-nine. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. Her birthplace was her father's, which her mother, in her own words, had not been consulted about. Joseph Knight was a compositor on a newspaper at Newburyport, but his people were at Deerfield, and in the early spring of 1862, with the war a year old and the town full of drums, Abigail Jewett Faulkner, who was expecting and unwell, went up the Connecticut valley by the cars to rest in the old farmhouse on the meadows where her husband had been raised. The child came on a raw March night, in a room hung with the drying tobacco leaves of the previous autumn, and the midwife, who was Joseph's sister-in-law, announced that the baby looked at things. She was carried back to Newburyport in a basket at a month old. She was always a Newburyport child. But she kept the Deerfield birth, as some people keep a scar, and could recite, to a bored audience, the date of the burning of the town in 1704. She grew up over her mother's hat shop, among type cases and hat blocks, and was the solemn, watchful elder of two sisters. Her father taught her to set type, and to read a proof upside down and backward, and she was the best in her class at finding an error, which he said was the only talent that a printer really needed. Her mother taught her the lamps. By the age of twelve she could sit at the top-floor window with a spyglass and name every lit room on the waterfront, and say which of them was wrong. It was a training of the eye, and the eye was all of it. At sixteen she was found to be able to glance at a page of figures and see the one that had been altered, and at a crowded wharf and see the one man who was not working. The deaths came close together. Her father, who had suffered a stroke at the case, died in 1883, and her mother, whose old wound had never closed, in the winter of 1886. Both girls were at the bedside at the end. It was the second death that she afterward talked about, when she talked about anything, for her mother lit a lantern in the window at her own request, and told the girls, in the plain voice in which she had sold hats, that the lamp was not for a prayer. It was so that whoever was looking for her would know where she was. Abigail was twenty-three by then, a small, straight, fair, rather silent young woman with her father's lopsided smile, and she had already been a typist for three years. She sat in the office of a shipping agent in Boston and worked the new Remington machine with a speed that astonished the clerks. She had not been called, and she knew it. She had the eye, the training, the pistols that her mother had left and a good deal of knowledge of the Ledger's ways, and she was used by the New England cousins as a watcher and a carrier, a trained and trusted pair of hands, who sat in dark doorways with a notebook and took down what she saw. But the moment that makes a hunter had not come, and she did not pretend that it had. The family, who had been surprised by her mother's delay of ten years, was careful not to press. She married Walter Harlan in 1884, in the spring, in Northampton, and he, who was told most of it in a low voice on a Sunday walk by the river, made her a hunter's case to fit her coat and offered to keep her pistols in order. She took him, she said, because he was the only person who had ever looked at her kit and remarked that it was very good but badly kept. She was thirty-one in 1893, and living at Salem, with two small daughters and a husband who was employed in the yards, when the quarrel came. It was about a cousin. Nathan Pike was a mill orphan from Lowell whom her father had taken on as an apprentice when she was a child, and who had lived so long at the family's table that she called him brother and he her sister. He had drifted into the hunting, in a rather careless way, and had been told by her, on an October evening, in the kitchen, that he was going to be killed if he kept on in that fashion. He said that she had no right to lecture him, since she had never so much as fired at anything. They said a number of things to each other. He left the house in a temper. He was found two days later in the salt marsh at Marblehead Neck with his throat opened, and he was buried in a cold rain. He came back on the ninth night. She was sitting up in the kitchen with the lamp lit, for the sake of her own conscience, and she heard his step on the back path, and then his voice at the door, asking, in the same aggrieved tone, to come in and finish what they had been saying. She said afterward that she had never been so entirely awake. The lamp was the thing. She looked through the glass and saw, at once and with a clearness that she had never known, that his shadow fell the wrong way, that the snow on his shoulders had not melted, and that his shoes, which had been mended in Lowell, were wet with marsh water that had not dried in nine days. It was the Falcon's Eye. She saw the single wrong thing and held it. She took a pistol from under the dresser, and she did what she had not yet done in her life, and she did it kindly, since he had been her brother, and he did not get in. It was the calling. Her mother's partial cousins in Salem and Gloucester, who came the next morning, found her at the kitchen table with her hands folded, and said to each other that they had seen it at last. The Ledger recorded her name and the alias of The Bright Kestrel in the month of the year. She was by then a hunter who hunted with her eyes, and she went out for the next thirty-eight years in the evenings, from the office and from the house, with a notebook, a pair of field glasses and a pistol, and stood in doorways and on bridges, and watched. She fixed, as a Hunter should, on a single quarry, and kept to it. She followed one of them for eleven months through three towns, taking a note of every trifle, before she put him down in a boathouse on the Merrimack, and the cousins, reading the notebook afterwards, said that it was the only hunt they had ever seen that had an index. Her husband supported her absolutely, and she him. Walter turned the stakes and cleaned the pistols, and her two daughters, who grew up among the lathe-shavings and the telescope, were not called, and were not sorry. The Great War found her fifty-five, with the office in Quincy, and the influenza of 1918, which filled the naval hospital at the Fore River, found her sitting at the bedsides of four hunters in a week. She was tired after that. She sat more often. She died in the autumn of 1931, of heart failure, in her chair by the window, a few weeks after her husband, with her field glasses in her lap, and with the lamp lit. Abigail Knight is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Bright Kestrel, the typist of Salem who could find the one wrong thing in a room and did not look away from it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the watchers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who won by seeing first, and who knew that a good eye and a steady hand are the same gift, lit from two windows.