Edith Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Meek Ledger. Craft: Falcon's Eye.

Edith Faulkner was born in 1640 in Bolton, Lancashire, into a town that was still counting what the Civil War had cost it. Four years after her birth, Prince Rupert's Royalist troops had stormed Bolton's ramparts, and the neighbours of her childhood still pointed out the houses that had been burned and the doorsteps where men had been cut down. Her father, Abraham Faulkner, was a cooper who worked in a yard behind Deansgate, hooping ale barrels for the inns and butter firkins for the farms of the moor edge. Her mother, Olive Duckworth, was a weaver who kept a hand loom in the front room, throwing the shuttle for the fustian merchants who sent out linen warp and cotton weft and collected cloth by the piece. Edith grew up with two sounds in the house, the knock of a mallet on iron hoops from the yard and the slap of the batten from the loom, and she said late in life that she could tell the hour of the day by which had stopped first. The household kept a second trade that the parish never saw. Abraham was a slayer of the Faulkner line, a man the family ledgers called The Amber Tally, and the Red Ledger that Hugh Faulkner had opened in 1455 during the Wars of the Roses lay wrapped in oilcloth beneath the cooper's tools. The Faulkners were Lancastrian to the marrow, and Abraham carried the old grievance against the Proctors of Yorkshire and the vampire the ledgers call only the Guest, who had slipped away at Towton in 1461 and whom each family blamed the other for losing. Edith's elder brother George Faulkner, born in 1637, was already being brought along as a slayer at his father's elbow. Edith, the girl, was given a needle. Her mother apprenticed her at twelve to a dressmaker in Churchgate, and the first thing she learned was to sit still, keep her eyes down, and hear more than she was seen to hear. The calling that made her a vampire slayer came in 1656, when she was sixteen. That winter the night watch in Bolton found a dead carter on the causeway near the church, and the coroner's men took him away to be buried. Next morning he was on the causeway again, in the same place and the same posture, with the same two marks at the throat. The watch carried him off a second time and a third, and by the third morning the town was frightened enough that constables were talking of witchcraft. Edith was fitting a bodice for a draper's wife in a room overlooking the church when she looked out of the window and knew, quite suddenly and quite calmly, that the body on the causeway had been placed there and not merely dropped, and that the thing that had placed it was standing at the corner of the churchyard wall a full hundred yards away. She could see the fold of its coat. She told the draper's wife she felt faint and went home to her father. Abraham took her seriously at once, which surprised her, and taught her in the cooperage after dark. The craft that came to her was the one the family afterwards named Falcon's Eye, an unnatural steadiness of sight at long range and in poor light, so that she could read a face across a market square and mark a figure on a moor edge at dusk. It made her a fine shot, though her real gift was to watch. Her gear was a flintlock pistol, a costly piece for a cooper's daughter, which Abraham had from a Preston gunsmith in exchange for a year of casks, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes she cut herself from the hedgerows above Heaton and seasoned in the chimney corner. She hunted the causeway vampire in the third week of January, waiting on a cold night in the shadow of the church and putting it down with a single shot and a stake before it knew it was seen. The Red Ledger has the entry in Abraham's hand, and under it, in a small neat hand that is plainly hers, the record of the weight of powder she used. That small neat hand gave her her name. The Faulkners of Lancashire were loud people, and the ledger of the 1650s and 1660s is full of boasting entries, but Edith's entries were short, dated, exact and never once embellished. Her cousins and later her own children called her The Meek Ledger, half in teasing and half in respect, because she seemed to ask for nothing and yet her tallies were among the most trustworthy in the whole book. She dressed plainly, kept her hair under a coif, spoke gently, and had a way of standing in the corner of a room that persuaded men to say things in front of her they would not have said to her father. She worked the tally more by listening than by chasing. A gown ordered in haste, a client who wanted a high collar in the height of summer, a servant who came for a fitting looking bloodless and afraid, all these came to her hands through the dressmaker's trade and led her to more than one nest in the market towns between Bolton and Blackburn. She married in 1665, the year the plague scoured London and the alarm came up the roads to Lancashire so that the Bolton corporation posted men at the town ends and forbade the fetching of cloth from the south. The bridegroom was Josiah Wrigley, a chandler from Haslingden, a quiet, thickset man who dipped tallow candles and sold them, with soap and rushlights, from a shop near the market cross. He had met Edith when she came to buy candles by the gross for a night of waiting in a churchyard and did not ask why. He asked instead, some months later, what she wanted the stakes for, and when she told him he went on dipping candles for a while and then said that he would prefer to know the hour she went out and the hour she meant to be back. That question became the shape of their marriage. Josiah kept the shop and the accounts, sat up with a lantern in the window, and sometimes went out with a dark lantern of his own to stand at a lane end and hold her horse. He was never a slayer, and he never wished to be, but the Faulkners came to trust him more than they trusted most of their own. Two children followed. Olive Wrigley was born in 1667 and named for Edith's mother, who died the year after, in 1668, and left the household with a hard silence. James Wrigley Faulkner was born in 1669 and given the Faulkner name to carry, in the family custom of passing the surname down by whichever line needed it. Olive proved to be a slayer, called young, quick to temper and quicker with a stake, and Edith taught her the patience she herself had been born with. James was not called. He grew into a careful, bookish man who kept the candle shop, then the accounts of several neighbouring ledgers, and became the family's steady hand with money, which was a decidedly useful gift when powder and shot ran to a pound or more a season. Edith saw a good deal of national weather from her shop window. She lived through the year of the great plague, the Restoration's slow work of turning Puritan Bolton back to bishops and prayer books, and the hard winters of the 1680s. When William of Orange landed in 1688 and James II's throne came down without a shot, she was forty-eight and a grandmother in waiting, and she noted in the ledger, without comment, that the county's Jacobite gentry kept their own vampires quiet during those months and that the Guest's trail, never found, went colder still. The old rivalry with the Proctors went on in that period as an exchange of letters, tallies and complaints carried by carriers on the York roads, not as any quarrel that ever came to blows. Abraham died in 1685, and Edith carried his portion of the Red Ledger for some years afterward, keeping it in a locked box beneath her cutting table. Josiah died in 1701 of a fever that took half a street of Bolton that autumn, and Edith wore black for him longer than her family thought necessary. She sold the shop's lease to a nephew of his, moved into two rooms above the dressmaker's premises on Churchgate, and went on sewing for the town's wives and for the few who came at night. Her sight remained sharp to the end, though her body failed. In the last two years she wasted slowly, and she died in 1710, aged seventy, still keeping her tallies in the same small hand. Her daughter Olive followed her in 1714 and her son James in 1722, and the ledger entries she left were copied out in later generations as a model of how the book ought to be kept. In the lore of the Slayerverse she remains the one Faulkner whom no one thought worth boasting about and whom everyone eventually trusted.