Anna Faulkner was born in 1815 in Concord, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-two years as a seamstress and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Fallow Tinder, a name that comes from the dry, pale grass that catches at a spark, and describes a quiet woman who was ready for one. She was a Soldier, a hunter who works in company and under a plan, and her craft was Beacon Reading, the interpretation of signal fires, lamps and other lights set to warn or to call. She was the younger daughter of the printer and slayer Jacob Brewster Faulkner, The Fallow Bridle, and the boarding-house keeper Abigail Putnam, and the sister of Effie Faulkner. She married the carpenter Homer Jewett in 1835, raised two children, Abigail Jewett Faulkner and Elias Jewett Faulkner, both of whom became slayers, and died in 1887 of a fall, at seventy-two.
Her father, Jacob Brewster Faulkner, born in 1783 and dead in 1830, was a printer of Newburyport and a hunter of the Soldier type. Her mother, Abigail Putnam, born in 1788 and dead in 1854, kept a boarding house on Water Street for sailors and shipwrights. Anna was born in Concord by another of the family's accidents of the calendar. In the spring of 1815 Abigail, who was heavily pregnant, had gone inland to the Concord store of Jacob's cousin Naomi Adams Faulkner, The Slow Lantern, to rest for a few weeks and to be near a midwife whom the family trusted, and the child arrived a month early, in the room above the shop, in a thunderstorm. She was named for a great-aunt. She was carried back to Newburyport in a basket, and grew up there, in the dining room of a boarding house, among sailors.
She was a sharp, dark, slight, restless child, who was into everything. At four she had climbed the back stairs to the roof, at five she had taken the cat out in a dory, and at six she was caught in the kitchen, with a borrowed knife, cutting a pattern from a sheet. She took to needlework early. Her mother, who was not a fine needlewoman, found a neighbouring seamstress to teach the child, and by eight she could hem, by ten she could make a shirt, and at twelve she was mending the sails of the dories that the boarders kept at the wharf. She had quick fingers and a quick eye, and a capacity for silence that was quite unlike her sister's easy talk.
Her father was the great figure of her girlhood. She adored him. He was a cheerful, broad-shouldered, noisy man, who came in at all hours with a cold wind and a fresh tale, and she followed him about, at a distance, like a small dark shadow. She noticed that he went out at dusk. She noticed that he took a bag. At fourteen she followed him, one night in the winter of 1829, down to the waterfront, and watched from behind a pile of barrels while he stood for an hour at the end of a wharf, without moving, and then walked away. She did not understand it. She asked him the next day, without any ceremony, what he had been waiting for. He looked at her for a long time, and said that he would tell her when she was older. It was a promise that he did not live to keep.
His death, in the spring of 1830, on a lonely road north of the town, in an ambush, was the great shock of her life. She had followed him again that night, at a distance, though he had told her not to, and she was the one who found him. She was fifteen. She sat on the road, in the dark, with his head on her knee, and was still there at dawn, when the carter found her. She said nothing at the funeral. She said nothing for a week. On the eighth day she came down to breakfast, took a piece of bread, and told her mother that she was going to learn what he had been doing.
Her mother, Abigail, told her. She did it that night, in the kitchen, in a steady voice, and added that she had been dreading the conversation for fifteen years. She said that it was the Red Ledger, that it had been the work of the Faulkners for three hundred years, and that the girl was old enough to learn, if she wished. Anna wished. Abigail trained her herself, with the help of the cousins, Naomi Adams Faulkner of Concord and a number of others who came and went at the back door of the boarding house, and over the next six years she learned what there was to learn. She learned the lore, the watch, the gun and the silence.
The formal calling came in 1836, at twenty-one, in a schoolroom. She was by then a seamstress in her own right, working from a shop in Newburyport, and she had been engaged for a month to teach sewing to the girls of a dame school on the edge of town, a long, low room with a stove. On the nineteenth day, in the middle of a lesson on the running stitch, a small girl at the end of the bench put up her hand and said that there was a man standing in the corner, who would like to know when the class was finished. There was nobody in the corner. The girl said that he wore a long dark coat and did not seem to have any eyes. Anna put down her needle. She asked the child to tell her again, slowly, what the man was doing. The child said that he was looking at the lamp.
She did not dismiss the class. She sat quite still for an hour, finishing the lesson, with her eyes on the corner, and when the children had gone, she locked the door, turned down the lamp and sat down to watch. The man came, and she dealt with him, and in the morning she went to her mother and said that she had found out what she was. Her mother said that she had known it since she was four.
Beacon Reading was her own. She took it from the lamp in the schoolroom, which the thing in the corner had looked at, and from her father's old custom of leaving a light at the end of the wharf, and she built on it a whole system. A vampire, she observed, has a particular relation to light. It avoids the sun and dislikes a flame, and it is drawn, for reasons that nobody has explained, to a steady lamp in a window at night. It will stand and look at it. She began to set lamps. She would put a lantern in a window, at a chosen house, at dusk, and watch the street from a dark doorway opposite, and by the end of a fortnight would have seen every stranger who paused to look at it. She read the lamps of a whole town. She knew, from the pattern of the lights, where a hunt was going well and where it was going badly, and which of her cousins was at which window.
She was a Soldier in her method. She did not like to hunt alone. She worked with her cousins, in a company, and planned each hunt in advance, with a chart of the town and a list of lamps. Her gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, carried in a workbasket, and a dark shawl with an inner pocket. She was credited, in fifty years, with some fifty vampires, and was said never to have been wounded, which her cousins regarded as a scandal.
She married Homer Jewett in 1835, a year before her calling, a young carpenter of Marblehead whom she met at a wedding, and she moved there, to a little house near the harbour. He was a quiet, gentle man, and they were happy. He learned what she was on the night that their daughter was born, and took it in with composure, and made her a box. Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Abigail Jewett Faulkner was born in 1837 and lived until 1886, and Elias Jewett Faulkner was born in 1841 and lived until 1865, and both grew up to be vampire slayers of the Red Ledger. Anna trained them both, in the back room of the house in Marblehead, with the shutters closed.
Her husband's death in 1856, of a stroke, left her a widow at forty-one. She went on with the work, and with the sewing, which gave her an excuse to be in any house in the town. She took in a number of girls as apprentices, three or four at a time, and taught them the needle, and the watch, and a fairly thorough acquaintance with the town's lamps. Her son Elias was mortally wounded in the last weeks of the Civil War, at a river crossing in Virginia, and died of the wound in November 1865, at twenty-four, and her sister Effie, who came up from Kentucky for the funeral, found her sewing a shirt. She said that it was the only thing that kept her hands still.
She lived for twenty-two years longer. She gave up hunting at sixty-five, but kept a lamp in the window at dusk until the end. She died in 1887, at seventy-two, of a fall on the wharf steps, on a winter evening. She had gone down, her granddaughter Alice said, to see that the light at the end of the pier was lit.
Anna Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Fallow Tinder, the seamstress of Marblehead, the hunter who read the lamps. In the Slayerverse she stands for the signal keepers of the Red Ledger, the slayers who understood that a light in a window is a question, and that the dark, sooner or later, will stop to answer it.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
