Clara Washington Faulkner

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

Clara Washington Faulkner was born in 1987 at Seattle, Washington, three thousand miles from the kitchen in which she was raised, and is living today in Seattle, where she is a nurse on an intensive care ward. She belongs to the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own beyond a stethoscope, a pair of clogs and a patience that her colleagues have been known to describe as medical. She is the elder daughter of the diner cook Leonard Washington, who died in 2024, and of the bookkeeper and slayer Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, The Quiet Rook, who is living, and the sister of Monica Faulkner, born in 1988. She has not married and has no children. The family remembers her as the one of the Ledger who went west, and who made a calling of looking after the people who would otherwise have been left on the ward alone. She was born in Seattle because of a journey. In the winter of 1987 her father Leonard, who had never been west of Baton Rouge, was asked by his elder sister, who had married a shipwright and gone to live above Puget Sound, to come and cook for her husband's family at a christening, and Cynthia, who was twenty-four, six months along and a woman who did not care to be left behind, said that she would go too. They took the train, in four days, in coach, with a basket of food that Leonard had packed against the possibility of Kansas. The child was five weeks early. She arrived on a cold, bright, rainy morning in February in a hospital on Capitol Hill, with Leonard's sister holding Cynthia's hand and Leonard in the corridor with a plate of red beans that a nurse had told him he was not to eat in that part of the building. She weighed five pounds. She was named for her grandmother, Clara Allen Faulkner, the hospital cook who had died in 1962, and she was taken back to New Orleans at three months, on a plane, because Cynthia had had enough of trains. She grew up above a small hardware store in the Irish Channel, in a long house with a kitchen that ran the whole length of it and a back door that nobody locked. She was a tall, grave, dark-eyed girl, with her father's large hands and her mother's habit of counting things. Her father cooked on the line at a diner on Magazine Street and came home with the smell of the flat-top in his hair. Her mother kept the books of a ship chandler and, in the evenings, walked. Clara went with her when she was ten, on the dusk route along the levee and back by the rail yard, and was taught, without the word being used, to notice. She learned that a bin that had been moved was a bin that had been moved, and that a dog that did not bark was telling you something. Her mother held that a girl who has learned to see a street can see a ward, a classroom or a room of people, and Clara, who was an obedient child, said that she would see. She was told the truth at fifteen, one of the two daughters told separately, at the kitchen table, over a plate of eggs, with her father at the stove and her mother in the chair. She took it with two sensible questions and a request for something to eat. She asked whether it was dangerous and whether she would be expected to do it. Her mother said yes and no. Her father said that a house needed a hot stove more than another pistol, and that he had said it before and would say it again. Clara, who understood, said that she would think about what she was for. She has been thinking ever since, she says. She was not called. She sat at the table through the whole of her sister's telling the following year, and she was the person who had to hold her sister's hand. She took a degree in education at a university in the city and taught, for five years, in a primary school in the Irish Channel, in a classroom with a window onto a street of shotgun houses, where she found that what she cared for was not the lesson but the child who sat at the back with a stomach ache. She noticed it in every year. She kept a box of plasters, a thermometer and a bag of oranges in her desk, and was known by the nurse in the building as the best unpaid assistant she had ever had. At twenty-eight, in 2015, she told her mother over the telephone that she wished to be a nurse. Cynthia, who had been waiting for it for six years, said that she would send the money for the first term and a list of her own failings as a bookkeeper. Clara went to Seattle that autumn, to the city of her birth, on a plane, with two suitcases and a letter from her father's sister, who lived on the Sound and had saved her a room. She took the accelerated nursing course at a university on the hill, in a year and a half, in a grey and brilliant climate that she says she has never got used to, and graduated with honours at twenty-nine. She went into an intensive care ward, where she has worked since, in a hospital on First Hill, a few streets from the one that she was born in. It is a place where a person's life is a column of figures on a monitor, and a nurse who stands at the bed for twelve hours, in the small hours, with nothing to do but watch the figures, is as close as any person living to what a night patrol was in the old days. She says that she learned it from the dusk route. She walks the ward at the turn of the light, in her own order, bed by bed, and has noticed, on a great many occasions, the one thing that was wrong before the alarm said so. In the spring of 2020 the pandemic reached her ward in the first week. The early cases of the whole country came to the Puget Sound, in a nursing home on the east side of the lake, and she was among the first in the city to put a man on a ventilator. She worked sixty hours a week for four months, in a mask, a visor, a gown and a pair of gloves, in a room in which she was often the only living human being that a patient saw. She held a tablet to the faces of the dying so that their families could see them, and she held their hands in two pairs of gloves. She says that there was one man, a retired ship's pilot, who died on a Tuesday and asked her to tell his daughter that the channel was clear. She did. She is thirty-nine now, and says that she does not expect ever to forget it. She did not tell the Ledger any of it, and was not asked. It is a matter of some pride in the family that the Ledger's cousins in Seattle, who are a handful, have never had to lift a finger on her ward, and that she has never reported a thing that she should not have. She has, though, been called, now and again, by a hunter who needed a person in a white coat to explain what had happened to a hand. She came and bound it up and said nothing. It is the kind of service that a hospital gives, and a Washington gives better. She lost her father in the spring of 2024, to heart failure, at the counter of the diner where he had stood for fifty years, and she flew back on the first plane, and stood in the churchyard at the back, in a black coat, between her sister and her mother. She stayed ten days, and cooked, on her father's flat-top, a pan of red beans, which her sister told her was nearly as good. She lives now in a small flat on Capitol Hill, under a hill and a grey sky, with a houseplant that has survived three winters and a framed card from her mother that says only that the totals are the last thing to look at. She rings home every Sunday at six, and tells her mother that the weather is the same. Clara Washington Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the nurse of the Sound, the cook's daughter who went to Seattle and held the hands of the sick through the long nights. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and carers of the Red Ledger, who were never called to the hunt, who took the old family habit of noticing into the wards of a new coast, and who proved that a calm voice at a bedside is one of the oldest watches that the Ledger keeps.