Amice Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Wary Reeve. Craft: Beacon Reading.

On the night in 1489 that Amice Faulkner became a vampire slayer, she was thirty-three years old, a wife of fourteen years and a mother of two, and she had gone to a wake because it was her neighbour's and because the family had asked for a woman who knew how to lay out the dead. The mourners were sitting in the dim room with the body on its board when the dead man sat up. Most of them ran. Amice, who had spent much of her girlhood watching birth and death at the bedsides of other women, stayed where she was, with her hands still smelling of rosemary and vinegar, and looked at him with a clear head and a kind of cold recognition. The man in the shroud looked back and then, for reasons she never fully explained, hesitated. That hesitation was her calling. She was born in 1456 at Pendle, near Burnley, in Lancashire, the first child of Hugh Faulkner, the falconer's son who trained hawks for the great Lancastrian households and who would open the Red Ledger the year before her birth, and of Idonea Slater, the weaver who kept his tallies honest. It was a country of bracken, black stone walls and low grey cloud, of small farms wrung from the flank of the hill, and of abbey lands, for the Cistercians of Whalley held great tracts of it and their granges sat among the pastures. Winters came early there. Oatcakes, sour milk, bacon and a good deal of ale made up her diet, and she grew up strong, with a broad forehead and steady hands and an odd, patient stare which her father said he had once seen on a merlin. Because Hugh was frequently on the road and Idonea's weaving kept her at the loom, Amice was sent early to the woman in the next valley who caught the district's babies, and she became a midwife's apprentice. It was not glamorous work. She carried the birth-stool, the linen, the herbs and the small knife, learned to count contractions by the light of a rush candle and to tell a mother's true danger from her ordinary fear, and she took her first delivery alone at fifteen because the midwife was drunk. Everything she later did as a hunter came out of that training: the calm at a crisis, the willingness to wait, and the habit of watching a body for signs before laying a hand on it. She married in 1475, at nineteen, the year her mother died of the sweating sickness. The groom was Roger Marsden, a tanner from Bolton, a big soft-voiced man who smelled permanently of oak bark and lime and who had asked her father for her hand in the manner of a man buying a good horse, honestly and with some fear. The marriage was affectionate and practical. She moved into his house beside the tan-pits, learned to live with the stench, and kept up her midwifery in the town. Her first son was born in 1478 and named Edward Faulkner, keeping her own family's name by the custom of the houses; her second, Denys Marsden, followed in 1480 and took his father's. The household lived by leather and by birth and by the exchange of small favours. Amice was rarely without a basket at her elbow and was known in three parishes, trusted by farm wives and by the wives of gentry alike. She loved her father and brother and sister and did not talk about their other business, for the Faulkners were a family that did most of its talking in lists, but she had seen enough to understand it. She helped Thomas once, in 1485, in the weeks after Bosworth when the Lancastrian side was suddenly triumphant and the Yorkist one suspicious, and afterward wrote to Hugh in her large square hand that a war made no difference to a woman in labour. Hugh died in 1487, and by then she was already the person to whom other Faulkner women turned when things went wrong. It was a role that prepared her for the wake. After the calling, she trained herself, which was unusual, for she had no mentor and no one in the family who could take up the task. Her brother Thomas, busy with his new Yorkshire marriage, could spare her only some advice and a set of stakes. She began with what she knew. Her father's yew bow, resined and restrung, and blackthorn stakes cut in the hedgerows and hardened in the tan-pit smoke became her gear, and she set herself to learn the moors as she had once learned bodies. What developed was a craft she called Beacon Reading, the discipline of noticing the small lights and darkenings of a country at night: a farm window showing where it should be dark, a beacon fire lit too early, a dog silent where it should bark. She used it to place a hunter before the hunt began. In the Red Ledger she is recorded under the alias The Wary Reeve, a name earned because she treated the parishes she watched as if she were the reeve of a manor, responsible for every sheep and every family in it, and refusing to take any risk until she knew what she was up against. In the dozen years that followed, her tally in the ledger was modest by the standard of the great hunters, but exceptionally clean. She took few vampires and lost almost none of the people she looked after. She hunted at night from a hayloft or a stone wall, with the bow, and only came down when she was sure. There is a recorded episode from 1494 in which she spent three nights in a hillside byre above Colne, watching a lit window across the valley, before she loosed a single arrow, and was afterward scolded by a cousin for wasting time and thanked by the family who lived below. She worked well with the other slayers of the Red Ledger and cheerfully argued with the Yorkshire hunters when they crossed her ground, but never with malice; the Proctors she met considered her, one wrote, the only Lancastrian who returned a borrowed lantern clean. Her sons were shaped by all this. Edward became a slayer, carrying the Faulkner name in the ledger, and Denys, though he bore his father's surname, followed too, learning at her side how to wait. She did not push either into the work, only let them see it. Roger, for his part, made himself the household's fixed point: he kept the door on the latch, the fire lit and the leather supplies flowing, and never once asked where she had been. She died in 1502, aged forty-six, beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt, when a rotten beam gave way as she was drawing on a target in the dark. The vampire was found dead the next morning under the same timbers, which the family took as a fair tally. Roger dug her out himself with a borrowed spade. Her gear was hung above the family hearth, and her ledger entries were finished by her sons. In the modern Slayerverse, Amice is remembered as the hunter who waited longest and lost least, the midwife who taught the Faulkner house to look before it struck, and the mother whose caution ran through her descendants like a family colour.