In the autumn of 1756 a ship came ashore on the Massachusetts coast with every hand aboard still at his post and not one of them alive, and a seventeen-year-old girl from Worcester who happened to be standing on the beach understood at once what she was looking at. That girl was Betsey Whittier Faulkner. Born in 1739 in the inland town of Worcester, she became a milliner by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, and under the alias the Silent Tally she kept one of the most orderly and least talkative entries in the whole Red Ledger of the Faulkners. She lived sixty years, raised two daughters, buried a husband and outlived a father, a mother and a war.
Worcester in her childhood was a shire town on the western edge of settled Massachusetts, a market of taverns and courthouse yards set among hill farms and stony pasture. It lay on the post road between Boston and Springfield, and drovers, wagoners and militia companies passed through it all year. Its people were farmers, cordwainers, tavernkeepers and lawyers, and its politics were hot. The wars with France on the frontier pulled its young men west and north every summer, and its meetinghouse filled each fall with widows in new black. The Faulkners lived at the edge of that country, where a militia sergeant was a man of consequence and a girl learned early to keep her ears open.
Her father, Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, was a militia sergeant on the western edge of the colony, a drillmaster, scout and picket captain who moved between the muster field and the frontier stockade. In the Red Ledger he was the Frontier Sexton, so called because he buried what the war left behind and asked no questions of it. Her mother, Betsey Whittier, also born in 1709, was a midwife who attended half the births of the district, and the daughter was named for her. From the two of them Betsey took different gifts: her father's steady eye and her mother's quiet hands. She had three brothers to grow up beside, Gideon Whittier Faulkner, born in 1733, who was not called to the work, and the younger Caleb Faulkner, born in 1741, and Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner, born in 1749, both of whom became slayers in their turn.
She was trained at the millinery counter and on the frontier road alike. A milliner in provincial Massachusetts made and trimmed caps, bonnets, ribbons and gauze, and dealt in the small imported luxuries that reached Worcester by way of Boston shops. It was a trade that put a young woman in every parlour and let her hear everything. But she went to the coast in the autumn of 1756 on an errand of her mother's family, to buy stock and visit kin among the Whittiers of the harbour towns, and it was there that the storm came. It blew for two days out of the northeast and stripped the shingles from half the town. On the third morning a merchant vessel lay on the sand with her sails in rags and her decks tidy, and her whole crew was found at their stations: the helmsman at the wheel, the mate at the rail, the cook in the galley. None had a mark on him, and none was breathing. Betsey walked the length of the deck while the town's men stood back. She noticed what they did not: that the hold was untouched, that the water casks were full, and that every man had the same two small marks at the throat.
Her mother died that same year. The parish took the death as the ordinary end of a hard-working midwife, and the family never quite forgave the coincidence of the two losses. Ebenezer, who had been called to see the wreck, recognised in his daughter what he had once recognised in himself and took her as his pupil. That winter he taught her the ways of the western Faulkners: the long watch, the study of ground, the reading of tracks in old snow. Her craft, which the ledgers call Long-Watch Tracking, was less a skill than a temper. She could sit for a night and a day in one place, watching a cellar door or a ford, and see the one thing that moved. In the classification the Faulkner clerks used, she was a Soldier. She carried a long rifle and silver-cast shot, and she used them seldom and exactly.
The name the Silent Tally came from her way of keeping accounts. She spoke little at ledger meetings and less in company, and her entries were spare: date, place, count, and no adjectives. Over three decades she filled more pages of the Red Ledger than any Faulkner woman of her generation. Some of the hunts were plain. A creature that had been taking sheep along the Quinsigamond was found and dispatched in a week of dry nights. Some were harder. In the second year of the war she and her father tracked a nest through the hill country north of Worcester and closed it over the course of a winter, and the entry for that season is a single line.
She married in 1762. Her husband, Amos Whittier, born in 1738, was a carpenter, a cousin on her mother's side by the reckoning of the parish, sober and cheerful and good with a plane. He built the fittings of her shop, a cupboard, a counter and a set of narrow drawers for ribbons, and he never asked what she did in the dark hours. He knew, and he kept the house lit for her. They had two daughters. Betsey Faulkner Whittier, born in 1763, followed her mother into the work and was called in her turn, and Elizabeth Faulkner, born in 1766, did not take the calling and married quietly. Following the family's custom, the Faulkner name ran through the daughters, and the older girl carried her mother's name and her father's surname inverted in the ledger's usual fashion.
Her father died in 1768, and the Frontier Sexton was buried on the hill above the town with a militia salute. It was the year Betsey began to carry the work alone, though her younger brothers Caleb and Ebenezer joined her over the following years. The Revolution came seven years later and the whole household was drawn in. Worcester was a hotbed of the patriot cause; the county's committees met in its taverns, and its militia marched to Cambridge in April 1775. Betsey kept her shop open, made cockades and haversacks, and hunted at night along the roads the army used, following a creature that had learned to feed on stragglers. Amos went to the siege lines as a carpenter, building barracks and gun platforms. He died in 1783, the year the peace was signed, and she wore black for him for a long while.
The rivalry with the Proctors was a matter of paper for her, as for most Faulkners of the period. She read the White Ledger when it reached her, made her own tally and did not gloat. On the question of the Guest, who escaped at Towton in the Wars of the Roses, she held the view of the Faulkner elders and said little more.
She died in the winter of 1799 of a cough that would not leave her, aged sixty, in her own house, with her daughters at the bedside. The long rifle went to her namesake daughter. The Silent Tally is remembered in the Slayerverse tradition as the Faulkner who counted without ever raising her voice.
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