Winter was the measure of Charity Cutler's life, and in the end it was winter that closed it. Born in 1759 at Deerfield, Massachusetts, she was a farmer's wife in the hill country of the upper Connecticut valley, and she married into the Faulkners, the Lancastrian house that kept the Red Ledger, without herself belonging to any slayer line. She died in 1814, at fifty-five, of a hard winter. Between those two dates she raised a son and a daughter, kept a farmhouse running through the coldest decades of the century, and learned to live alongside a husband whose second occupation she never quite named aloud.
Deerfield in her childhood was a frontier town that had not quite stopped thinking of itself as one. It lay on a broad meadow above the river, ringed by hills, with a single long street of Dutch-roofed and gambrel-roofed houses, a meeting house, a tavern and a great deal of memory. The raid of 1704, in which French and Indian forces had burned the town and marched captives north to Canada, was still spoken of at hearths, and one of the older houses on the street carried the scars of hatchets on its front door, which the family had declined to repair. Charity grew up among the descendants of survivors, in a place where vigilance was a habit and a story of a night attack could be told in the second person. The Cutlers were an established farm family of the meadows, growing corn, rye, flax and hay on the rich river soil, and keeping cows, pigs and a few sheep on the upland pasture. Her family papers do not survive, and the ledgers do not name her parents; what is remembered is her own account, that she was one of many children in a crowded, noisy house.
She learned the whole round of a farm wife's year. In spring there were seeds to sow and lambs to save, and the making of soap from wood ash and fat. Summer brought haying, and the rush to get the hay in before the thunderstorm, the picking of berries, and the long work of the dairy. Autumn was for harvest, slaughter and salting, drying apples on strings and packing barrels of pork, and winter was for spinning, weaving and making do. She was a big-boned, fair, direct young woman with red hands and an uncommon ability to keep accounts in her head, and she was known in the town for a certain steady good sense that some mistook for coldness.
She met Obadiah Faulkner through the ordinary business of the valley. He was a farmer, born in 1760, who had come up from the coast at the end of the war and taken a farm on the edge of the town, and he was, to the eyes of the neighbourhood, a decent, hard-working, somewhat silent man who had done his share of militia duty. Charity noticed him at a barn-raising, where he took the heaviest end of every timber and said nothing throughout, and she recognised a man who could be relied upon. They married in 1786. She was twenty-seven, which for the time was rather late, and he was twenty-six.
It took her some time to understand what he was. For the first year of the marriage she noticed only that her husband slept lightly, went out at dusk on rounds of the farm that seemed to have no purpose, and kept a long rifle in a case behind the chimney, which he cleaned with more attention than a fowling piece required. There were nights when he came in late, silent, with damp on his coat and something in his face that she did not question. One morning in the second winter she found silver shot cooling in a small iron mould on the hearth. She held one in her palm for some time. Then she put it back in its place and said nothing, and he was aware, from the way she set the breakfast on the table, that something had been settled between them. He was a vampire slayer, and she was the wife of one, and she was going to run the farm.
Her first child, Levi Cutler Faulkner, was born in 1787, and Keziah Cutler Faulkner in 1789. Both were given their mother's family name in the middle, in keeping with the practice by which the Faulkner name had always passed through daughters or women when the family found it wise. Levi grew into a stolid farmer like his father, without any calling. Keziah, however, became a slayer, and Charity watched the signs of it develop with a mixture of pride and dread. It was Charity, not her husband, who taught the children to shut the shutters at dusk, to keep a bucket of water and a bar by the door, and to stay in the house when the dogs began barking at nothing.
The farm demanded everything. When Obadiah was out, she ran it. When he was in the house, she still ran it, since he was a poor manager and a good hand. She hired labour at haying and bargained with the drovers. She sold butter and cheese and salt pork to the merchants of Hartford and Springfield, and was careful about the grain she held back against a bad year. In the poor season of 1816, two years after her death, the whole of New England would know a summer without a summer, but she had by then spent her working life in weather that ran hard, and in the cold decade of the 1780s and 1790s she had learned to build a store deep enough for any winter.
Her relationship with the family's hunters was practical and dry. She fed them, mended their coats, and did not ask what they had done; she kept the Red Ledger's business confidential, and on the rare occasions when someone from the Proctor side came through the valley she treated the visitor with careful, formal civility, having heard enough of the old quarrel to think it entirely a men's argument. She viewed the missing vampire, the Guest who had escaped at Towton, as a bad debt that neither family would ever collect.
She died in 1814, aged fifty-five, of a hard winter. The cold that year came early and stayed late, and there was a long spell in January when the river froze from bank to bank and the snow lay above the fence tops. She took a chill going out to the woodpile at night, when Obadiah was away, and it settled in her chest. She did not recover. Her husband lived until 1823, and her son Levi, until 1842. Keziah lived until 1831.
In the Slayerverse, Charity Cutler is remembered as the farmer's wife of Deerfield who kept the house while her husband hunted, and who, when she found the silver shot in the hearth, decided to say nothing and set the table.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
