Abigail Putnam was born in 1788 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and kept a boarding house for sailors and shipwrights in the port of Newburyport for over forty years. She married the printer and vampire slayer Jacob Brewster Faulkner in 1810, bore him two daughters, Effie and Anna, buried him in 1830 and ran her house on Water Street for another quarter of a century, dying in 1854 of heart failure at the age of sixty-six. She was not a hunter, but she was for a generation the hub of the Red Ledger's North Shore network, and her kitchen is where more than one vampire's fate was settled over a pot of tea.
She was born in Ipswich to a chandler, a dealer in ships' stores, whose name the family papers do not record, and her childhood was spent in the crowded, salt-smelling streets of a port that had seen better days. When she was eight the family moved to Newburyport, the larger town at the mouth of the Merrimack, where her father had found better trade. Newburyport in the 1790s was at the height of its prosperity. Its wharves were lined with ships trading to the West Indies, Europe and, increasingly, the East, its merchants were building the tall brick and clapboard mansions that still line High Street, and its waterfront was full of sailors, caulkers, riggers, sailmakers and cooperage workers.
A chandler's daughter grew up with the seafaring trades in her blood. Abigail knew the price of rope and tar by the age of ten, and she knew the names of the ships in the harbour and the men who sailed them. She was a tall, strong, freckled girl with a clear voice and a steady gaze, and she learned early to manage men twice her size, a skill that would serve her for the rest of her life. At fifteen she started work in a boarding house on Water Street, kept by a widow who had known her mother, and she learned the business from the cellar to the attic: the marketing, the cooking, the linen, the accounts, the billing, and the far more delicate matter of the lodgers.
A sailors' boarding house was not a simple enterprise. The men who took rooms were transient, often drunk, sometimes violent and frequently in debt, and a landlady had to be part innkeeper, part banker, part nurse and part magistrate. She had to feed fifteen men three times a day on a modest margin, keep the peace, settle disputes, hold their wages against their drinking and see them off to their ships on the right morning. The best houses were famous for their tables. Abigail, who had a gift for chowder, pies and pork and beans, made hers the most popular on the waterfront.
She met Jacob Brewster Faulkner in 1808, when he took a room in her employer's house while he was setting type for a Newburyport paper. He was twenty-five, broad-shouldered and cheerful, and he asked so many questions about the waterfront that she suspected him of being a revenue man. He told her, after a month, what he was, a printer, yes, but also a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and that he was looking for someone in the boarding houses who noticed things. She said that she noticed everything, that it was the job, and that he had been wearing the same shirt for a week. They were married in 1810, and he moved into the rooms above the kitchen.
The partnership was an extraordinarily effective one. Jacob walked the town every evening on his Dusk Patrol, and Abigail was at the centre of a web of information that stretched down the whole waterfront. She knew which ships were in and which were expected, which men had signed on for which voyages, who had come ashore with money, who had left in a hurry and who had not come down to breakfast. She kept a house register, as the law required, and she noted in the margin, in a private shorthand, any lodger whose habits seemed odd. In their first decade together, the Ledger records a number of vampires taken on the strength of her margin notes.
Her daughters were raised in the house. Effie Faulkner was born in 1812 and lived until 1890, and did not hunt. Anna Faulkner was born in 1815 and lived until 1887, and was called to the work as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the tradition of her father. Effie later married Ninian Thorne, in 1840, and carried the Faulkner name into the Kentucky branch of the House of Thorne. Abigail brought them up in the dining room, among the lodgers, with a firm idea of what was acceptable and an eye for what was not.
The War of 1812 was hard on Newburyport, whose trade was ruined by the embargo and then the blockade, and Abigail's lodgers dwindled to a handful of privateersmen and unemployed seamen. She stayed open by taking in whatever came. She cooked for the prisoners' families, fed the militia and sheltered a number of refugees from the coast. After the war, trade revived for a time, and the house filled again.
Jacob's death in 1830, in an ambush on a lonely road, left her a widow at forty-two with two daughters to settle. She took it with the same steadiness that she took most things. She kept the house, she trained Anna to the hunt, and she kept up the register. When the decline of the port's shipping in the 1840s and 1850s thinned her lodgers, she let the upper floors to mill girls and clerks. The house, in her last years, had the quiet of a retreat.
She died in 1854, of heart failure, in the chair in her kitchen, with a pie in the oven. Anna found her. The funeral was the largest that the Water Street neighbourhood had seen, and a hundred former lodgers sent money for the stone.
Abigail Putnam is remembered as the landlady of Newburyport, the woman who read a waterfront like a book. In the Slayerverse she stands for the ordinary intelligence network of the Red Ledger, the hotel, the tavern and the boarding house, where everything was noticed and nothing was ever said aloud.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
