Deborah Lord

Spouse of Samuel Putnam Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Deborah Lord was born in 1733 at Newbury, Massachusetts, a tidewater town on the Merrimack where the salt marshes ran out to the river mouth and every second man either built ships, sailed them or mended their sails. She was not a Faulkner by blood and never carried a slayer's calling, yet the Red Ledger of the Faulkner line remembers her more warmly than many who did. She was the woman who stood behind a household of hunters for half a century, keeping them fed, dosed, bandaged and, when it mattered, quiet. Her childhood was ordinary for the coast. The Lord house stood on a lane above the marsh, low and shingled, with a garret where herbs hung to dry from the rafters in bunches that smelled of tansy, pennyroyal and sage. Newbury in the 1730s was a Congregational town in every fibre. Sabbath meant two long sermons in a cold meetinghouse, with foot-stoves smuggled in by the older women, and the week meant salt hay, flax, cider and codfish. Deborah learned her letters from a dame school kept by a widow in the parlour of her own home, and she learned plants from her grandmother, who kept a book of receipts in a cramped hand. By twelve she could tell a good boneset from a bad one and knew which women in the parish should be sent for when a child had the throat distemper and which should be avoided. Herbalism in that country was not a profession so much as a reputation, earned house by house, and by her late teens Deborah had one. She met Samuel Putnam Faulkner over a cracked ploughshare. He was a blacksmith, born in 1730, broad in the shoulder and slow to speak, with a burn scar along one forearm that he explained differently to every child who asked. His people were Faulkners of the Massachusetts branch, descended by a long and much-discussed line from the Lancastrian house that had opened the Red Ledger in 1455, and he carried the family's odd habit of asking guests where they had been on certain nights. Deborah noticed that his forge kept a great deal of silver, ostensibly for plating harness buckles, and that he did not sell any of it. She said afterward that she had married him partly out of curiosity and partly because he was the only man in Newbury who never tried to tell her what her herbs could not do. They were married in 1754, when she was twenty-one, at a time when the frontier war with France was just beginning and every young man in the county was being counted for the militia rolls. Marriage taught her the family's secret in stages. She learned first that the forge worked at night more often than trade required, then that the silver was cast into shot rather than buckles, and finally, from her mother-in-law's careful silences, that the Faulkners kept a tally of dead vampires and that the tally was a matter of pride as well as duty. Deborah did not take up the rifle. What she took up was the medicine chest. When a hunter came home with a torn shoulder she cleaned it with a wash of comfrey and witch hazel and packed it with lint. When a fever followed a night in a damp cellar she brewed willow bark and elder. She kept a second shelf, behind the first, of things that were not for the parish: garlic pounded in vinegar, wormwood, monkshood used with terrible care, and a tincture she called only her sleeping draught, which she gave to slayers whose hands would not stop shaking after a bad night. Their children were born into that house. Naomi Lord Faulkner arrived in 1757, when Deborah was twenty-four and the war on the northern frontier was filling the Newbury road with recruits and refugees. Obadiah Faulkner followed in 1760. Both were called in due course to the work, which pleased Samuel and troubled Deborah in equal measure. She had wanted, she once said to a neighbour, at least one child who would grow old without having to learn what a coffin sounded like from the inside. She raised them plainly, with catechism at the hearth, arithmetic on a slate and a working knowledge of the local plants, and she taught them that the quality of a hunter was measured by whether they came home and whether they ate first. Naomi took to her mother's skill with medicine and always kept a satchel of dried leaves in her saddlebag. Obadiah was more his father's boy, quick with metal and slow with words. The Revolution divided Massachusetts into camps, but the Faulkner household kept its own counsel and its own ledger. Samuel mended muskets for the militia at Lexington season, and Deborah nursed the wounded who reached Newbury from the siege lines around Boston, which was chiefly a matter of flux, camp fever and infected feet. Harbour towns of that era lived by uncertain trade and rising prices, and paper money lost value by the month. Deborah paid for what she needed with barter, with syrups and salves handed across a half-door. She never went short of salt fish or firewood, because a herbalist who has quietly cured a family's child is fed for a lifetime. She became known in the district as a woman who could be trusted with a bad secret, and more than one frightened farm wife in those war years told her something that would otherwise have gone to a magistrate or a minister. Her husband died in 1779, in the middle of the war, worn out at forty-nine by the forge and the nights. She wore black for a year, as custom demanded, and then went on as before, but somewhat harder and much thinner. She stayed on in the house near the marsh, kept the forge fire lit for her son, and continued to treat whoever came to her door. The rivalry with the Proctors, the White Ledger house of Yorkshire descent, touched her only distantly. She knew that her husband's people traded barbed messages with the Proctor cousins over tallies and reputations, and she thought the whole business faintly absurd, a contest between grown men and women over who owned a dead vampire, though she never said so at a family table. When a Proctor relation once came to Newbury sick with a lung fever she nursed him in her own back room for nine days and sent him home without a word to the Ledger. In her later years she took to walking the high pastures that the family, out of a Lancashire habit, called the fells, gathering herbs in the early mornings and bringing home armfuls of yarrow and mullein. It was on one of those walks, in 1806, that she fell on a slope of loose stone and wet turf and was found by a boy driving cows. She was seventy-three years old. The Faulkner family record notes the cause simply as an accident on the fells, and her children, Naomi and Obadiah having both died in 1823 after long hunting lives, are recorded as having agreed that this was the sort of death she would have chosen, outdoors and in the middle of a task. The Ledger holds no kill under her name, and she would not have wanted one. Instead the margin of the Red Ledger carries a small notation, in a later hand, recording that the household of Samuel Putnam Faulkner and Deborah Lord Faulkner kept eleven slayers alive who otherwise would not have lived, by the count of the people who owed her their bandages. Later Faulkners, including those in Kentucky and New Orleans who inherited her recipe book, treated her as the founder of the family's tradition of field medicine. In the wider Slayerverse she stands as an example of how the craft depended on people who never fired a shot, and how a household of hunters was only as durable as the quiet woman in the kitchen.