Deborah Peabody Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Lone Spindle. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

Deborah Peabody Faulkner, known in the Red Ledger as The Lone Spindle, was born in 1707 in Andover, Massachusetts, and died in 1733 at the age of twenty-six. In those short years she was a working midwife, a vampire slayer of the Hunter archetype and the last apprentice of her father, Jeremy Faulkner, The Proud Rook. She was the most gifted hunter of her generation in the Faulkner line, and the ambush that killed her on a lonely road remains one of the sorer entries in the family's history. Her childhood was shaped by two households under one roof. Her mother, Joyce Peabody, was a dressmaker whose table sat by the front window of the cloth shop, and her father, Jeremy, was a cloth merchant who rode out at night. Her elder brother, Obadiah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1705, was to become a wheelwright and to stay out of the hunt. Deborah wanted precisely the opposite. From the age of seven she stood at the top of the stairs in her nightgown listening for her father's return, and by ten she could tell from the sound of the horse whether he had come home tired or worried. The Andover of her childhood was a place of stone walls and orchards, a parish with a strict Congregational meetinghouse and a long memory for the witch-hunt of 1692, and it was not a town in which a girl was expected to want a rifle. Her mother, by some private calculation, put her to the midwife's trade instead. This was a common and respectable path for a clever girl, and Deborah served her time with an older woman who had brought half of Essex County into the world. She learned to judge a labour by the pulse and the colour of the woman's face, to turn a child in the womb, to make raspberry-leaf tea and to stop bleeding with a hand and a clean cloth. She travelled at all hours, on horseback or on foot, to farmhouses along dark roads, and the trade gave her something few young women of her time had, which was a reason to be out at night that nobody questioned. Her father saw the use of that at once. It was through the midwife's satchel that she first began carrying salt, twine and a small bottle of lamp-oil where a woman of her age was not searched. The calling came in 1729, when she was twenty-two. She had been asked to attend a funeral in a nearby parish, as a friend of the family of the dead, and stood with the mourners by the grave at the close of a cold afternoon. The coffin was lowered, and the sexton, who had lifted the lid for a last look, found it empty. The mourners could not say how the body had gone, the family could not say why the grave clothes were folded neatly at the bottom, and the crowd began to whisper. Deborah, who had held the dead woman's hand a week before, felt something click into place with startling clarity. She knew what she was looking at. That evening she went to her father and told him she was ready, and, to her surprise, he did not argue. Jeremy became her mentor, and the year that followed was the only time father and daughter had entirely to each other. He taught her the long rifle, the loading of silver-cast shot, the reading of a track in mud and the setting of a watch. She turned out to be a better shot than he was. Her craft, when it emerged, was Hawthorn Craft: a lore of thorn, blossom and hedgerow that came out of the old Lancashire countryside by way of her family. Hawthorn had a name for being a warding tree, and Deborah learned to plant it, to cut it, to sharpen it and to lay it across a threshold or a window so that what should not cross could not. A hedge of hawthorn round a farmhouse, laid to her pattern, was said to hold better than any lock. She carried cut stakes in her satchel beside the midwife's tools, and the two trades mixed in a way that suited her. The name Lone Spindle came out of her habit of working alone. Slayers of the period usually hunted in pairs or small parties, but Deborah, small and quick and unobtrusive, went by herself along the roads between the parish farms, and she said that a spindle turns best when nobody is watching it. Her tallies in the Red Ledger through 1730 and 1731 were unusually clean and unusually numerous, and the Faulkner cousins in the Connecticut valley began to write to ask about her. The Proctors of the south, who kept their White Ledger a long way off, heard that a young woman in Massachusetts was outpacing the men, and one of their letters, preserved in a later hand, remarks with reluctant respect that the Faulkners had found a new sharpshooter. Her father died in 1730, and it changed her. She had lost her teacher, her only real confidant and the one person in the family who understood what she did. She carried on alone, fiercer and less careful. Her mother, Joyce, begged her to settle and marry, and she declined; she never married, never had children, and said she had no spare hours for a husband. Her brother tried to talk her out of the road, and she listened, and went on. Obadiah built her a light chaise with a hidden compartment, and she used it well, but she never quite stopped riding alone. In 1733 she was returning from a birth in the dark, along an empty road between two parishes, when something was waiting for her. The account in the ledger is short and clear on the point that it was an ambush, laid with care by a creature that had been watching her for weeks and knew which roads a midwife travelled. It struck at a narrow place between a stone wall and a wood. She was found in the morning beside the road, her rifle discharged, three hawthorn stakes in the mud and the horse standing quietly by. She was twenty-six years old. She was buried in Andover with the ordinary rites for a midwife, and the mourners never knew what the family knew. Her mother outlived her by four years and died in 1737. Her brother built her coffin, and the family kept her long rifle for many years afterward. Hawthorn Craft passed to later Faulkners through the notes she left, and it appears in the Red Ledger's margins long after her death. Within the Slayerverse she is remembered as the finest Faulkner marksman of her age, and as a warning about roads at night.