Ada Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Steady Lantern. Craft: Falcon's Eye.

Ada Faulkner was born in 1803 in Concord, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-five years as a schoolteacher and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Steady Lantern, a name that recalls her mother's, and it classes her as a Soldier, a hunter who works in the open, in company, with a plan. Her craft was Falcon's Eye, the discipline of watching a whole field at once, so that nothing in it moved without her noticing. She was the daughter of the teamster Benjamin Thayer and of Naomi Adams Faulkner, the shopkeeper and slayer called The Slow Lantern, and she carried her mother's work forward after a gap of seven years. She died in 1878 of a stroke, at seventy-five, having taught school through four decades and hunted through five. Her mother, Naomi Adams Faulkner, was born in Concord in 1774 and kept a general store in the town until her death in 1821, after a long night on the marsh. Her father, Benjamin Thayer, born at Deerfield in 1777, was a teamster who hauled freight on the western Massachusetts roads, a patient, good-humoured man who had married a slayer in 1801 and never once pretended that he did not know what he had done. Ada was their first child, born in the second year of the marriage, in a room above the shop on the Concord common. She had a younger brother, Horace Thayer Faulkner, born in 1806, who would become a carpenter. The children were brought up in a household that smelled of tea, tar, tallow and gun oil, and in which the long box behind the counter was never discussed and never locked. Concord in 1803 was a handsome farming town of some two thousand people, a place of white meeting houses, stone walls and elms, with a river that moved so slowly that visitors could not tell which way it flowed. The town had been the scene, in 1775, of the skirmish at the North Bridge, and its older inhabitants still talked about it, but for a child growing up a generation afterward the great event was merely a story told at the store by the men who sat on barrels. Ada listened to them. She liked the detail. She liked to hear how many men had stood on which side of the bridge, what the light had been and who had fired first, and she took from it a lasting conviction that things were worth setting down exactly. Her mother taught her to read in the shop, between customers, and to keep accounts on the back of a ledger page. By eight she could add a bill. By ten she could tell from the look of a customer whether he was going to ask for credit. She learned the stock, the prices and the habits of the town's families, and she learned something else, which her mother gave her slowly and carefully over several years, the way one teaches a child to cross a road. The general store, Naomi explained, was the best position in any village from which to keep a watch. Everyone came to it. Everyone talked. A shopkeeper who paid attention knew who had bought lamp oil in the middle of the night, who had stopped buying salt, and who had come to town in a coach and left on foot. She was still a girl when her mother began to take her out. Naomi Adams Faulkner had been a slayer since her twenties, and she hunted, in her own phrase, slowly, which meant that she walked the ground a number of times before she committed herself. She took Ada on the marsh at dusk, to teach her how to read a landscape. They would stand at the edge of a meadow, with the light going, and Naomi would ask her daughter to say what had changed since the day before. A fence rail down. A cow standing differently. A light in a window that had not been lit on Tuesday. The girl learned to see. It was the beginning of Falcon's Eye. Her mother's death, in 1821, at forty-seven, after a long night on the marsh in which she was taken with a chill that she refused to treat, was the first great grief of Ada's life. She was eighteen. She stood at the counter the morning after the funeral and opened the store at seven, because the customers would be waiting, and she served them all day without saying anything about it. Her father, who had been a good husband to the last, took to the road again and was seldom at home. The shop was run by Ada, with the help of her brother, for the next seven years. She did not take up her mother's work at once. She taught. The town was short of a schoolmistress, and the selectmen, who had seen the way she ran the shop, offered her the school on the north side of the river. She took it on, and taught a room of forty children, in winter and summer terms, for the next fifty years, in Concord and later in other towns. Her method, in the school as in the shop, was observation. She knew when a child had not eaten and when a child was being beaten at home. She noticed the ones who sat by the window and the ones who sat by the door. A class of forty children, in a small town, is a fairly complete survey of a community, and she learned to read it. She was called in 1828, at twenty-five, on the day a stranger died in a barn. It was a hot afternoon in August, and a farmer on the Lincoln road sent a boy running to the schoolhouse to say that a man had been found dead in his barn, and that the dogs would not go near the body. The constable was away. The farmer, a simple, decent man, did not know what to do. Ada, who had been dismissing her class, went with the boy. She found the dead man lying on the threshing floor, in an expensive coat, with no mark on him, and the three farm dogs crouched in the yard with their hackles up, whining and refusing to come within thirty feet. She knelt by the body. It was cold, though the barn was hot, and quite without blood. She looked at it for a long while. Then she sent the boy for a spade and a lantern, and sat down to wait for the dark. She did not know what she was waiting for. She found out. That night, in the barn, with her mother's old revolver, which she had taken down from its nail over the shop counter, she met the thing that had killed the stranger and that had been sheltering in the barn, and she did what her mother had taught her, patiently, from a distance, with her whole attention on the ground between them. She fired four times. The fifth time, the thing had stopped. Afterward she sat in the barn, in the grey light, with her hands perfectly steady, and understood that her life had changed. She went home, made a pot of tea, and taught school at nine. Falcon's Eye, as she came to practise it, was a soldier's craft. She did not hunt alone if she could help it, but arranged her hunts like a small campaign. She mapped the ground. She chose the positions, posted a watcher on each approach, and kept the field in view from a single commanding point. She liked to have a lantern on a pole, well behind the line, so that the eye would be drawn to the light and away from her people, and it was from this, rather than from her mother's alias, that she took her own. Her gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, which she kept in a canvas bag under the schoolhouse stove. In fifty years she was credited with some thirty tallies, all of them taken in and around the Concord country. She never married. Her brother Horace, who lived a mile from her, was her closest companion, and the two of them dined together on Sundays for thirty years. She regarded the school as her family. Its graduates, who numbered some two thousand, wrote to her from every state in the Union, and in the 1860s a stream of them, in uniform, wrote from the field. She replied to each. She sent parcels of stockings and letters of advice about boots, and in the winter of 1862 knitted, with her own needles, thirty-one pairs of mittens for the boys of her own old class. She retired from the school in 1875, at seventy-two, and lived quietly for three years on her pension and her savings. She died in the spring of 1878, of a stroke, in her own kitchen, with the kettle on the fire. A lantern of the old pattern, which had hung over the shop door, was found in the parlour. She was buried beside her mother, in the old burying ground on the hill. Ada Faulkner is remembered as The Steady Lantern, the teacher of Concord and the soldier of the Red Ledger. In the Slayerverse she stands for the long watch, the hunters who stayed at their posts for a lifetime and kept the light, year after year, in the same place.