Ebenezer Adams Faulkner was born in 1770 in Wilmington, on the Brandywine River, in the Quaker country that William Penn's heirs still governed, and he lived forty-five years as a blacksmith and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The Ledger knew him as The Cold Bridle, a name taken from the Faulkner habit of calling a hunter by the tool of his trade. He belonged to the Hunter type, a patient tracker who preferred to read a district for weeks before making a move, and he died in 1815 in an accident on the high ground outside the town, leaving no wife and no children but a reputation for care that the family still quotes.
His father was Caleb Faulkner, born in 1741 and dead in 1802, a slayer of the Red Ledger whom the book calls The Lexington Courier. Caleb had been a printer's apprentice and later a courier, and on a day in April 1775 he had carried the news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord south along the post road, changing horses at every tavern, until he reached Philadelphia. The ride gave him his alias and, in the family's telling, the nerve to move his family between the Delaware landings and the Connecticut valley as work offered. Ebenezer's mother, Naomi Adams, born in 1742 and dead in 1783, kept a boarding house in Wilmington in the years of Ebenezer's boyhood, a tall brick building near the landing where millers, sailors and travelling men took a bed and a meal. She was not a hunter, but she ran her house like a garrison, and there was little that happened at her table that she did not hear.
Ebenezer had three younger siblings, Silas Faulkner, born in 1772, Naomi Adams Faulkner, born in 1774, and Nancy Faulkner, born in 1779. Silas and Naomi were both called to the work, and their names appear in the Ledger with their own tallies. Nancy, who was the youngest, was born at Northampton in the Connecticut valley, had a quiet, practical nature, did not hunt, and in time became a milliner. With so many hunters in one generation the family, scattered between the Brandywine and the Massachusetts towns, was for a few years one of the busiest branches of the Red Ledger, and whenever the brothers and sister gathered, the table held three slayers, all of them related and all of them hungry.
The Wilmington of his boyhood was a mill town. The Brandywine dropped quickly to the Delaware, and its banks were lined with flour mills, some of them among the largest in the Atlantic colonies, grinding the wheat of Pennsylvania and Maryland for export. Quaker merchants ran the place in their broad-brimmed hats and plain coats. The wagons came in loaded with grain, the shallops went out with flour, and the air was full of dust and the sound of millstones. The Faulkners, who had come to the river towns of the middle colonies after the Massachusetts years, lived among Quakers and mill hands, in a setting unlike any the family had known. The Friends' peaceable ways and plain speech suited the Faulkners' habit of discretion, and more than one Quaker neighbour noticed the Faulkner men coming home at odd hours with mud on their boots and said nothing.
Ebenezer was apprenticed at fourteen to a blacksmith on the road to the landing, a large man with a forge that never seemed to go out. He learned to draw iron, to weld, to shoe a horse and to make the hundred small things a mill town needed: hinges, nails, chains, wagon tyres, and the iron fittings of the great water wheels. He was a slow and careful worker, and his welds were so sound that millers sought him out. A bridle bit was among the most precise of these tasks, and it was one in which he took special pride. A good smith could tell from the feel of a bit in his hand whether it would hold a nervous horse or break under it. The Ledger's nickname for him, The Cold Bridle, combined that skill with his manner, which was so even that even an argument seemed to stop in front of him.
The calling came in 1789, when he was nineteen, at a mill. A shift of workers came out at dawn looking pale and would not speak, and the miller, who was a Friend and not a man given to panic, sent for the smith because the workers' hands were cold as iron and they would not touch bread. Ebenezer followed them back inside with his father at his shoulder, and they found what had been feeding on the night shift. It was the first vampire he saw, and the first he killed. From that morning his father took him fully into the work, as his mentor, and he began his training properly.
His craft was the Dusk Patrol, a method the Faulkners had refined in the Massachusetts ports. A patrol was a regular circuit of a district, walked at the hour when the light failed, looking for the small signs that vampires left: dead animals with no blood in them, cold spots in a barn, a sleeper who would not wake, a mill that was quiet at the wrong time. Ebenezer walked his circuit through the town, along the canal banks and up the creek roads, for twenty-five years, and in that time the Ledger credits him with a steady tally that never dropped below a few vampires a year. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, and he made the shot himself in the forge, pouring it into moulds of his own cutting and testing each ball on a scale. He also kept a pair of iron shackles, forged to a pattern of his own, that he used to secure a vampire until the dawn.
He never married. The work took his evenings, the forge took his days, and the boarding house took the rest. His sisters teased him about it, his brother Silas observed that he was married already to the anvil, and his mother, before she died in 1783, had said that he would find the right person when he was ready. He never did, or did not say so. His nephews and nieces in the wider family remembered him as a large, quiet uncle who brought horseshoes as gifts and told no stories.
He died in 1815, aged forty-five, in an accident in the high ground above the town, while on a patrol at dusk. The Ledger records it without embellishment: a rock slip on a wet path, a fall, a night out in the cold, a body found at first light by his sister. The family buried him in the Quaker burying ground behind the mill, with the permission of a Friend who had known him all his life. His father's courier bag lay across the coffin.
Ebenezer Adams Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner line as the blacksmith hunter of the Brandywine, the man who made his own silver shot and who walked the same circuit for a quarter of a century. In the Slayerverse he is a model of patient, methodical slaying, in which vigilance counted for more than heroics.
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