Beatrice Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The first thing a paramedic learns, Beatrice Faulkner says, is that nobody calls an ambulance on a good day. She was born in 2002 in Portland, Oregon, and is living today in Portland, where she works as a paramedic on a city ambulance. She is a woman of the House of Faulkner and of the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but she was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the younger daughter of the oil-field roughneck Mark Kowalski Faulkner and of the pharmacy technician Crystal Kelly, who were married in 1997, the granddaughter of the slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, the niece of the slayer Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, The Slow Bell, and the sister of Laura Kelly Faulkner. The family remembers her as the one who arrives, in a hurry and in a clean uniform, on the worst night of somebody else's year, and who has never needed to be told what to do next. She was born in the spring of 2002 in Portland rather than in Denver, and the reason is a plain one. Her father was working that season on a drilling contract in the Powder River country, a fortnight on and a week off, and her mother, who had a sister married to a ship's pilot on the Columbia River, was persuaded to spend the last month of her confinement in a house in the north of the city, with a view of a railway bridge and a great many cranes. Crystal, who was twenty-seven, did not care for being persuaded. She said that she would have a baby in Denver, as she had had the last one. The baby came three weeks early, on a wet morning in April, in a hospital on the east side of the river, and the aunt, who was a calm and managing woman, rang the rig, and Mark came west in two days in a borrowed truck, driving the width of three states with a teddy bear on the seat. He says that he has never seen a more furious baby. The Pacific Northwest, he told her later, had made her what she was. She, who was small, loud, red-haired and entirely without fear, has never regretted it, and has spent her adult life going back. She grew up in Denver in the house on the south side, with the porch swing, the lilac hedge and a sister two years older who ran the household and a father who was frequently away. The two girls were close and utterly unlike. Laura counted. Beatrice moved. She was the child who climbed the fence, who was found on the garage roof at six and who, at eight, took the family's first-aid kit from the hall cupboard and, with great seriousness, bandaged the dog. She had been named for her grandmother Beatrice Kowalski, the librarian, who had a look of preparing to disapprove, and she grew into it. By the time the old lady died in the winter of 2011, in a hospice room with a view of a hedge, the girl of nine, who had been taken to see her and had been told to be quiet, went to the end of the bed, took a tissue and, without a word, wiped her grandmother's hand. A nurse noticed it. She said afterwards that she had never seen a child who knew where to put her fingers. She was told what the family was at sixteen, in the garden, by her father, in short pieces, and she took it in her stride, as she took everything. Her aunt Lorraine, the slayer, had been a figure of her childhood, a quiet, brilliant woman who turned up on Sundays and fixed things with a wrench. When Beatrice heard that the work was real, she asked, as her sister had, a practical question: whether the hunters were ever hurt, and who looked after them. Her father said that mostly it was a cousin with a first-aid box and a pharmacy technician with a telephone. She said that she would like to be that. He said, after a pause, that the family had a good many of the first and not nearly enough of the second, and that he would be very glad. She finished school in 2020, in the first season of the pandemic years, and the plan, a place at a college in Oregon to study emergency medical care, was upset like every other plan that spring. She went west all the same, in an old car with a mattress in the back, in the August of that year, and arrived in a city under a brown sky. The fires of that Labour Day week, the wildfires that came down the Cascades on a night wind, filled the valley with smoke so thick that the streetlights stayed orange at noon, and the people of Portland wore masks twice over, one against a virus and one against the air. She found work at once, as an emergency medical technician on an ambulance, and was thrown, at eighteen, into the worst season that the service had known. She says that she learned more in her first month than in her four years of school: how to talk to a frightened man in a driveway, how to move a patient down three flights of stairs, how to count a pulse in a moving vehicle and, above all, how to stay calm at three in the morning while everyone else around her stopped. She trained as a paramedic in the evenings, passed her examinations in 2023 and now rides the advanced crews on the east side of the city, on a twelve-hour shift, in a green uniform and a pair of boots that she is on her third set of. She worked through the heat dome of the last days of June 2021, when the temperature in the city rose above a hundred and ten and the ambulances did not stop for three days, and she carried an old man from a top-floor flat, in a heavy chair, down the stairs, and then went back up for his wife. She says that she does not remember that week, only that it was very bright. Her partners say that she was the only one of them who did not stop to sit down. A paramedic sees a great many of the things that the Ledger exists to prevent, an arm opened by a hand, a throat marked in a way that the report will call an animal, a patient who will not say where he was bitten, and she learned the signs, from her aunt's notes, within a year. She does not hunt them. She writes down what she sees, treats the person in front of her and telephones a cousin in Denver, to whom the number has been given, and who sends it on to the people who will go. Her people in the Ledger are very proud of her. Her father, who is a man of few words, drove the width of four states in the spring of 2024 to watch her receive her certificate and sat in the back with his Broncos cap on his knee. Her mother, the pharmacy technician, who had once told a hospital that she could judge a dose by looking at it, rang a pharmacist in Portland to tell her what the girl liked for breakfast. Her sister Laura sends a list every week. Her aunt Lorraine, who rarely says what she thinks, once told her, over the telephone, that she had always thought that a Faulkner who knew where to put her hands was worth more than one who knew where to put a knife. She is twenty-four, a short, sturdy, freckled young woman with a quick laugh, her mother's brisk walk and her father's hands, a rain jacket that she has worn for four winters and a small flat above a bicycle shop in the south-east of the city. She keeps a first-aid kit in her car, a second in her bag and a third, for emergencies, in a drawer, and she cycles to work in the summer and takes the bus in the winter. She is, as she says, very happy. She has a cat, a bad knee and a standing invitation to dinner from her mother's sister, the ship's pilot's wife, who lives across the river and has never once let her leave hungry. Beatrice Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the Portland paramedic who rides the night shift, the younger daughter of the roughneck who drove the van and a girl who carried her grandmother's name into a world of sirens and wet streets. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called and who go to the wounded all the same, the nurses, the medics and the carriers, who showed that a steady pair of hands at the right door at the right hour can be the whole difference between a family that is lost and one that is found.