Abraham Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Amber Tally. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Abraham Faulkner was born in 1611 in Bolton, Lancashire, in a smithy yard that smelled of coal smoke and wet iron. His father, Edward Stansfield, was a smith who worked a forge behind the market cross, shoeing the carriers' horses and mending the ploughshares of farms out towards Turton and Horwich. His mother, Margery Thwaites, was a weaver, and the rhythm of his earliest years was the double beat of hammer and loom, one from the yard and one from the room above it. The child carried the Faulkner name rather than his father's, which is a matter the ledgers put down to the old family custom by which a surname passes through the women, and which nobody in the household ever seemed to think worth explaining to a boy. His elder sister Mary Faulkner, born in 1608, would become a vampire slayer in her own right, and it was Mary, more than any adult, who taught him that the family had a second occupation that the parish never saw. Bolton in those years was a town of fustians and coarse cloth, of hand-loom cottages strung along the lanes and pack-horse trains carrying pieces to Manchester. It was also a town of hard Puritan opinion, where the minister's sermons ran to two hours and where a boy who missed the Sabbath could expect a visit from the churchwarden. Abraham learned his letters at a dame school and then at the grammar school, where he was a competent but restless scholar, better at sums than at Latin. At fourteen he was bound apprentice to a cooper, which in a country of ale, salted fish, tallow and butter was a trade that never wanted for custom. His father died in 1625, when Abraham was fourteen, and the apprenticeship, which might otherwise have been a matter of choice, became the thing that kept the household fed. He learned to rive oak staves, to raise a cask over a fire, to fit the heads and to drive the hoops so tight that a barrel would hold water, or hold a secret, for thirty years. He was a broad, slow-speaking man with hands roughened to the colour of the wood he worked, and the neighbours remembered a habit of standing quite still at a doorway for a long minute before walking through it. He mistrusted haste. It was said in the family that he could listen to a street for an hour without seeming to listen at all, and that he never once lost his temper in company, which the ledgers treat as the rarer accomplishment. He married in 1636, when he was twenty-five, taking as his wife Olive Duckworth, a weaver from Garstang, who had come south with a bundle of cloth and had stayed. They lived in a narrow house near the cooperage with the loom set in the front window for the light. Their son George was born in 1637, and the years that followed were the plain, comfortable years of a craftsman with a wife who earned as much as he did. The calling came in 1639, when Abraham was twenty-eight. He had been sent up into the chapel loft to measure the gallery for a new set of barrels of communion beer, and while he was there the curate asked him to help carry down the parish register, which was being moved to a dry chest. It fell open in his hands. On the page for that year a name had been written in a clerk's careful secretary hand, an entry for a burial, and Abraham found that he could not read it. He could read the date and the parish, and he could read the entries before and after, but the name itself slid away from his eye as a word does when one repeats it too often. He stood in the loft for what he later reckoned to be a quarter of an hour, and when he came down he told his wife only that he had a headache. That night he dreamed of the dead man walking the street below the cooperage, and in the morning he went out and found the footprints. The family account is that his sister Mary, who had been watching him for some time, came to the door before noon and said, plainly, that it had begun. Abraham trained as a Soldier, in the family's sense of the word: a slayer who meets the enemy directly, without cunning or disguise, and who relies on discipline and order. His craft, which the ledger names Long-Watch Tracking, was patience in a form so complete that it became a technique. He would take a position with a clear view of a doorway, a churchyard or a ford, and hold it through a night, or two nights, without food, fire or movement, until the thing he was watching came out of hiding and showed him where it lived. His gear was a flintlock pistol, at the time still a newish and expensive mechanism, which he carried for the moment a target could not be closed with, and hawthorn stakes that he turned himself at the cooperage, seasoned in the back of the workshop among the barrel staves. The Lancashire slayers gave him the alias The Amber Tally, in part for the colour of the oak shavings in his hair and in part, the ledger explains without further comment, for the steadiness with which he kept his tally in the Red Ledger. His notable hunts were mostly quiet ones. One winter he watched the tithe barn at a Turton farm for nine nights, lying under a tarpaulin with a pitch-lined flask of hot ale, until a creature that had been taking the farm's cattle and, on one occasion, a labourer, walked out to drink at the trough. He took it with a single stake at the first light. On another occasion he followed a vagrant preacher across three parishes because the man's sermons were always followed by a death, and found in the end that the preacher was nothing worse than a fraud, which he wrote up in the ledger with unusual dryness. He recognised, as all Faulkners did, that a slayer's reputation rested on entries more than on kills, and he wrote his entries in a small upright hand, with the date, the place and the witness. When the ledgers were compared at the periodic meetings between the two families, the Proctor clerks conceded that his numbers were unimpeachable. Two great events ran through his middle years. The civil wars split the northern gentry, and Lancashire was a county of split households, with Royalist Lathom and Parliamentary Manchester and Bolton itself a stronghold that Prince Rupert stormed in the spring of 1644. Abraham kept his head down and kept his barrels in stock, supplying both armies where he could and refusing to say which he preferred. Slayers, he told his son, had a single enemy and it was not a Cavalier or a Roundhead. Later came the great plague year of 1665, when the news from London filled every Lancashire market with fear and the town authorities set watchmen on the roads. Abraham, by then in his fifties, spent that summer watching the graveyards, because in a season of open pits and hurried burials the creatures were feeding on the confusion. He never caught the plague, and he was never able to say whether that was luck or the effect of forty years spent breathing hop smoke and oak tannin. His daughter Edith Faulkner, born in 1640, and his son George became slayers in their turn, and Abraham trained them himself with the same patience he brought to his craft, making them sit through their first night watches beside him in silence. George learned quickly and Edith learned deeply, and neither ever needed to be told a thing twice. Olive died of a fever in 1668, and Abraham gave up the loom in the front window but never moved it, so that the cooperage house went on looking as if someone were about to sit down and work. He remained in Bolton for the rest of his life, an old man on a tall horse, riding out to farms that still sent for him when a cask was leaking or something else was wrong. He died in 1685 at the age of seventy-four, of a fall from a horse on the moorland road above the town, which is a death that the ledgers record with the faint irony reserved for men who survived so much. George Faulkner died in the same year, and the family ledgers treat the two deaths as one grief. Abraham's entries in the Red Ledger were carried forward by Edith, and later Faulkner slayers took his method of the long watch as a standard exercise. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the cooper who taught a family to wait, and who proved that a tally kept quietly is worth as much as one shouted from a pulpit.