Cora Faulkner

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

Cora Faulkner was born in 1813 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and lived fifty-five years as a schoolteacher and then as a farmer's wife in the country behind the North Shore. She was the elder child of the printer Gideon Hale Faulkner and the schoolteacher Hannah Dunlap, and the sister of the vampire slayer Lewis Faulkner. She was not a hunter, and she said, with some asperity, that one person in a household of readers ought to be able to be left alone. She taught school in Newburyport for many years, married a farmer whose name the family papers do not record, and spent her last decades keeping a dairy and a hearth on an Essex County farm. She died in 1868 of a fall, at fifty-five, having lived through the Civil War, having read the whole of the Red Ledger's family letters, and having, unlike most of her relations, kept a copy. Her father, Gideon Hale Faulkner, was born in Worcester in 1787 and died in 1849, a printer who held that his business was to print what was true. Her mother, Hannah Dunlap, born in Newbury in 1781 and dead in 1836, was a schoolmistress who had taught some two thousand children their letters. They were married in 1812. Cora was born the following year, during a single year that her father spent at the great Worcester presses, working as a journeyman in the shop where he had served his apprenticeship, and she took her first breath in a rented room above a bookbinder on Main Street. The family stayed on at Worcester for two years, through the birth of her brother Lewis, and returned to Newbury in 1815, and she remembered nothing of Worcester except a legend that, at six weeks old, she had been carried into the printing shop and had sneezed at the smell of ink, which was taken by her father as a sign. She grew up at Newbury, near the green, in a small house at the corner of a lane, among books, chalk dust and printer's proofs. It was a busy and argumentative household. Her father commuted to Newburyport by a coach that left at six, and came home with the day's news. Her mother taught the school down the road. Her younger brother Lewis, born in 1814, was a quiet, serious child, who followed his sister everywhere and asked her questions. At night the four sat round the kitchen table and read aloud, taking turns, from the almanac, the newspaper, the Bible and whatever else came to hand, and argued about what they had read. She said later that she had never met a family that could quarrel so enjoyably about a comma. She was taught at home. Hannah, who had taught the alphabet to hundreds of children, was strict and exact with her own, and Cora could read at three and write at four. By eight she could parse a sentence, and by ten she had read the whole of the King James Bible, the greater part of Pilgrim's Progress and a good many pages of Gibbon. She had her mother's clear, dry intelligence and her father's love of accuracy, and her own curiosity, which was unsparing. She wanted to know where things came from. She wanted to know how they worked. She took a clock to pieces at eleven and put it together again, a little slower than before. At sixteen she began to teach. She took a summer school in a village near Newbury, with twenty-six pupils, and then another, and at eighteen she was offered a place in the school at Newburyport, where her mother had taught, and where she remained for the better part of fifteen years. She was a tall, pale, erect young woman, with a high forehead, dark eyes and her father's heavy black eyebrows, and she was feared by most of her pupils. She was also, as one of them later said, the only teacher who ever told them why. She never said that a thing was so because it was so. She made the children find out. In a school in which the usual method was the birch and the catechism, it was a considerable innovation. It was Hannah who told her about the Red Ledger, at the age of nineteen. She did it in the parlour, with the door shut, and she produced from a drawer a small, plain book bound in brown cloth, which she said was a copy of the family's letters. Cora read it through that night, by candle. It was a record, in a dozen hands, of the Faulkner hunters of the New England coast, and of the life and times of a family that had been hunting for three hundred years. She read her aunt Sally's account of a hunt at Ipswich. She read her brother's name, in his first year, in a list. She came down to breakfast and said that she would like to keep a copy. Her mother said that she had been hoping she would ask. She became the family's archivist. Over the next thirty years she copied, in her fine clear hand, nearly every letter that passed through the household, from the cousins of the Red Ledger in Salem, Newburyport, Worcester, Northampton and Concord, and arranged them, by year and place, in a set of bound volumes. She indexed them. She cross-referenced them. She could tell, in a moment, which of the cousins had hunted in a particular parish in a particular year, and what they had found. The letters, which might otherwise have been scattered and lost, were kept, and it is largely from the volumes that she compiled that the North Shore branch of the Ledger has been able to reconstruct its history. She was not, however, only a clerk. She read what she copied, and she noticed things. She noticed, in 1842, that three letters from different hands mentioned a stranger in a grey coat who had been seen in Ipswich, Salem and Newburyport, in that order, in a single autumn. She noticed, in 1847, that a village near Andover had reported an unusual number of deaths among young women, and that the records of a village in Maine, fifty years earlier, told exactly the same story. She wrote to her brother. She wrote to her cousins. In each case her note reached a hunter in time. The volumes of her notes, which run to some four hundred pages, are known in the family as the Newbury Index. Her mother's death in 1836, of the sweating sickness, was the first great grief of her adult life. She was twenty-three. She took over the household, looked after her father and continued to teach. It was in 1840, after a lecture at the lyceum, that she met the man she married. He was a farmer of Essex County, a widower of thirty-eight, a large, silent, sandy man with a dairy of thirty cows, who had come to town to hear a talk on agricultural improvement, and who had taken a seat next to hers. She corrected his pronunciation of a word in the lecture, in a whisper. He said that she was right. He called on her three days later, with a cheese. They were married the following spring, and she moved to the farm, a long, low, weathered house at the edge of a salt marsh, with a barn, a dairy and sixty acres of pasture. She was a farmer's wife for the rest of her life. She learned to milk, to churn, to make cheese and to keep hens, and she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she liked it. The work had a logic of its own. It was not unlike teaching, in that it depended on patient, repeated attention, and she was good at it. She kept her volumes of the Red Ledger's letters in a cedar chest in the parlour, and every evening, when the milking was done, she sat down at the table, beneath the lamp, and added to them. Her husband never asked what she was writing. He knew, in a general way, that she corresponded with a large number of relations, and he thought that it was a fine thing for a woman to do. He may have known more. In the winter of 1851, when a hunter of the Ledger arrived at the farm in the dead of night with a broken leg, he was put to bed in the spare room and nursed for three weeks with a stoical good humour, without a single question. She took this, rightly, as a declaration. The war came. Her brother Lewis, who was forty-seven, was in the thick of a different sort of war, in the Ledger's New England country, and she copied his letters faithfully. Her father had died in 1849. She had no children. She kept the farm going through the wartime, when the price of milk doubled, and helped to organise the local ladies' society that sent stockings and bandages to the regiments. In the autumn of 1868, at fifty-five, she fell from the loft of the barn, where she had climbed to look for a missing hen. She died two days later. The volumes of the Newbury Index, to which she had added a last entry a week before, were found in the cedar chest, tied with a cord. A slip of paper on the top, in her hand, said only: Keep these dry. Cora Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the keeper of the Newbury Index, the schoolmistress who copied the letters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the archivists of the Red Ledger, the careful readers who noticed the pattern that the hunters in the field could not see.