Betsey Faulkner Whittier

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Bright Reeve. Craft: Night Trapping.

When the ledger clerks of a later century came to write up Betsey Faulkner Whittier they found that she had left almost nothing in her own hand. She had listened for a living, and it was the listening that made her the best spy the Faulkners of western Massachusetts ever had. She was born in 1763 at Deerfield, on the meadows of the upper Connecticut Valley, in a town that remembered the French and Indian raid of 1704 with the same bitterness that it remembered the winters. Her father, Amos Whittier, born in 1738, was a carpenter who framed barns and meeting-house galleries up and down the valley and who could hang a door so that it never stuck in any weather. Her mother was Betsey Whittier Faulkner, born in 1739, a milliner whose shop window was hung with bonnets, ribbons, straw hats and fine gauze, and whom the ledger knew, in a different capacity altogether, as the Silent Tally. The daughter took her mother's Christian name and her father's family name and had Faulkner attached to the pair, since in that house the surname passed through the women. Deerfield in the 1760s was a place of long streets shaded by elms, of a wide common, a tavern and a meeting house with a cock for a weathervane, and of the Old Indian House, still pocked with hatchet marks in its door from the raid. The gossip of the town was very good, and a milliner's shop was the best place for it. Women came for a new cap or a ribbon and stayed an hour, and in that hour a great deal about the valley was said, from which farm had lost a child in the night to which peddler had been seen too late on the road. Young Betsey learned from behind the counter how to sit quiet with a needle in her hand and let a customer talk herself out. She was a slight, fair girl with light hair, a straight back and a sharp voice when she wished to use it, and from an early age she was known in the shop as bright, a word which followed her, later, into the ledger name that she carried. Her calling came in 1780, when she was seventeen, and it came in a cellar. The Revolution was in its fifth year, and the war had thinned the valley of young men and made a household's disappearance easier to explain. A farm on the road toward Greenfield had fallen silent, and the neighbours who went to look found the door unbarred and the fire cold and no one at home. Betsey went down into the cellar behind an uncle who had been sent for a lantern, and found the stores untouched: the barrels of salt pork, the cider, the bins of turnips and apples, the crocks of butter, all standing in order under the low beams, and not a soul in the house who might have eaten from them. A family of seven who had left everything they owned and not so much as a crust taken. Standing in that cold, orderly dark she understood, with the abrupt certainty which every slayer describes afterwards, that whatever had taken them had taken them for its own reasons, and that it was nothing ordinary. She went home, and her mother, who did not need to be told, took her into the back room of the millinery and shut the door. Betsey Whittier Faulkner became her mentor, and no one could have taught her better. The Silent Tally had been called years before, and she had built a career on the principle that a slayer's best weapon is not the shot but the knowing of where to be. She showed her daughter how to read a household's habits, how to see which windows were latched too carefully and which farms were being visited by strangers who kept to the night, and how to place a snare and wait for it. Betsey's own craft came from that lesson. She called it Night Trapping, and it was exactly what the name implied: the careful preparation of a spot, a lane or a doorway or an empty barn, set with silver wire, salt, a lantern arranged to throw a false light and a place in the dark from which to watch, so that the quarry walked into the place that had been chosen for it. She carried a long rifle with silver-cast shot as her final answer, but she used it rarely. She preferred to have the thing pinned and helpless before she ever cocked the piece. The valley gave her plenty to work with. By the middle of the 1780s Betsey had moved from her mother's shop to a house of her own in Deerfield's main street, where she kept a boarding house for travellers and post riders. It was a cover and a livelihood at once. Guests told her their business, and a woman who cooked the breakfast and made up the beds could see who slept by day and who did not, and could learn from the way a man ate what he was. She ran the house with a kind of cheerful efficiency, kept the accounts in paper and coin, put an extra candle in the window of any room whose occupant she did not trust, and took to her books each night an account of the day's arrivals. The ledger names four hunts in the decade that followed, all against solitary creatures that had attached themselves to the river traffic. One of them, taken in the winter of 1791 in the shell of a burned mill near the mouth of the Deerfield, was drawn into a trap that she had prepared with four days of patient work and the loan of a neighbour's sleigh as bait. She had a small, sometimes rueful sense of humour, and a habit of naming her traps after people in the town. Her younger sister Elizabeth Faulkner, born in 1766, was never called and never wished to be, and helped in the house and the millinery with an efficiency that Betsey came to depend upon. Their father Amos died in 1783, when the girls were twenty and seventeen, and the two of them and their mother kept the family going on the earnings of the shop and the boarding house. Betsey remained unmarried. She was courted at least twice, once by a young schoolmaster and once by a well-to-do tanner's son, but she declined them both without much regret, and her mother's opinion, which she valued, was that a slayer's business was not made easier by a husband who had to be lied to. She had no children. The women of the family, as usual, acted in place of husbands and heirs, and her sister's household later became the heir to hers. Her mother, the Silent Tally, died in 1799, and for the last eight years of her life Betsey worked alone. She grew a little harder in that time, a little quicker to put the rifle to her shoulder, though she never stopped listening. Beyond the valley the rivalry between the ledgers continued at its usual low simmer. The Proctors of Pennsylvania and Virginia sent no one to Deerfield, but the tally in the White Ledger was rising in those years and the Faulkner column had fallen behind. She took the matter personally and quietly, saying that she did not mind losing a race to the Proctors, but she disliked losing it to a tally she could not verify, and that year she doubled her rounds in the hill country north of the town. Her end came in 1807, in a chase. She was forty-four. A creature she had been following for three weeks broke from cover in the small hours of a March night and ran for the roofs of the town's crowded back lots, and Betsey, who never let a quarry go while she could follow it, went up after it by way of a woodshed and a barn. The snow on the shingles was old and wet, a false thaw had loosened the ice, and she lost her footing on a steep pitch above a lane and fell from the eave to the frozen ground, dying of the injury within the hour. The neighbours who found her supposed that a prowler had frightened her off the roof. Her sister Elizabeth, who knew better, went to the barn at first light and found the trap that Betsey had set, still whole, with the trace of the thing that had run. The Red Ledger honours her under the name that her mother had chosen for her, The Bright Reeve, and the family remembers her as the sharpest watcher of her generation, a woman whose craft was patience and whose instruments were a lantern, a length of silver wire and a wide-open ear. Deerfield, which never knew the half of it, remembers a milliner's daughter who ran a good boarding house. In the wider history of the Slayerverse she is one of the Faulkner vampire slayers who worked without recognition, a spy in a small town who trapped the dark on her own terms and who never once asked to be thanked.