Edward Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Red Spindle. Craft: Night Trapping.

Edward Faulkner was born in 1478 in the shadow of Pendle Hill, near Burnley in Lancashire, at a time when the county was still counting its dead from the civil wars and had not yet decided whether to be sorry. He was the elder son of Roger Marsden, a tanner, and Amice Faulkner, a midwife's apprentice, and he was called a miller's son because of an arrangement that his neighbours found entirely natural. Roger's yard, with its stinking pits of bark and lime, lay downstream of the mill on the Brun, and the tanner's boys were sent up to the millpond as soon as they could carry a sack. Edward grew up among the sound of the wheel and the white dust of flour, and it was as a miller's lad that the parish knew him, a tall, fair, slow-speaking youth whose hands were always dusted with meal. The country of his boyhood was a high hard one. The wool farms ran up the sides of the fells, the abbey lands of Whalley and Sawley held the best of the valley pasture, and the stone-walled moors above them were grazed by sheep that the Lancashire clothiers turned into coarse, hard-wearing cloth. Houses were low and thick-walled, roofed with stone slates, heated by a peat fire that was never allowed to die. The diet was oat and barley, cheese, salt bacon and a great deal of ale, and the seasons were marked by lambing, shearing, the hay and the killing time in November. Edward learned to read the weather off the shape of Pendle, and he learned to be silent, which in that country was the accepted form of good manners. His mother was the important person in his childhood, though he did not know why. Amice Faulkner had been born in 1456, the eldest daughter of Hugh Faulkner, founder of the Red Ledger, and she had grown up with a book in the house and a bow in the stable. As a girl she had been drawn into the midwife's work, which took her out into the dark at every hour to houses where the door was unlatched and no one asked what she carried in her bag. She was known in the ledger as The Wary Reeve, and her caution was legendary: she never entered a house by the front, never stood with her back to a window, never accepted a cup that she had not seen filled. Edward saw her go out on many nights and thought only that she was a busy woman. He was twenty-four before he understood what she did. The understanding came in 1502, and it came in a sickroom. A neighbour's son had been ill with a fever for nine days and the household had sat up with him in shifts. When the fever broke, on the tenth night, the boy opened his eyes, looked around the room and, in a voice quite clear and quite calm, asked that the shutters be closed. Edward, sitting by the bed, felt the hair rise on his arms. He saw the window, still black, and the way the boy's eyes did not follow the candle. He rose, closed the shutters, and said a few words to the mother, then walked home through the dark and told Amice what he had seen. She looked at him for a long time and then went to the chest and took out the ledger. In that same year, before the winter closed, she died, and the work that she had begun passed into her son's hands, so that Edward became a vampire slayer in the same season that his mother left the trade. He was called that night, in the sickroom, and the Red Ledger records his entry: Edward Faulkner, a miller's son of Pendle, taken into the book. She had time to teach him. In the months between the sickroom and her death, Amice trained her son in the ways of the Red Ledger, in the long patient methods of a hunter who worked in a house where every neighbour was known. Her death, in 1502, was quiet and unexplained, and Edward took the ledger and her advice and carried on alone. He took the alias The Red Spindle, a name that was said to have come from the strand of red wool his mother tied about the door-posts of houses she had marked, and from the way Edward's method seemed to spin its threads together until a whole neighbourhood was bound into a single line of inquiry. His craft was Night Trapping, and it was the thing for which he was chiefly known. It consisted of the patient preparation of ground: a track watched for weeks, a gate loosened and re-hung, a house made to look empty, a lamp set in the window of a shed, until the creature that hunted in the district could be drawn into a place where it could be taken. It was a slow and unexciting kind of work, and it depended on a very accurate knowledge of the country. The archetype the wiki assigns him is Soldier, because he was steady, orderly and unafraid of a long campaign. His gear was a matchlock pistol, an early and unreliable weapon that he treated as a last resort and a source of noise, and a supply of hawthorn stakes, which he cut himself every winter from the hedges above the mill. Edward was a large man, given to plain wool coats and a broad hat, and he carried himself with the slightly stooped courtesy of someone who had spent his life passing through low doorways. He never married and had no children, and the wiki records nothing about any attachment. He preferred, it seems, the company of his brother. Denys Marsden, born in 1480 at Garstang, was two years younger and a hunter in his own right, and the brothers worked the fells together for some years, though they quarrelled over method. Edward set his traps by night and slept by day; Denys watched the beacons and went by instinct. They did not always understand each other, and when Denys died in 1515, Edward lost the person who argued with him most usefully. The events of his lifetime went by him without much disturbance. In 1513 the Flodden campaign drew men from every northern parish, and the whole of Lancashire went north under the Stanley banner; Edward was thirty-five and was left, as a man whose absence would have been noticed by the wrong people, to guard the district while the levy was away. The years that followed brought the dissolution of the monasteries, and the northern risings of 1536 shook the county. The great abbeys, which had held the land his family had worked, were closed and their stones carted away, and the whole texture of the parish changed. He watched it all with the same unhurried attention he gave to a fenced field. He grew old on the fells. His relations with the Proctors of the White Ledger were correct and remote; he sent his entries to the family keepers and received theirs, and he was never once heard to say a word about the Guest, who had escaped at Towton before his mother was born. He died in 1548, at the age of seventy, of a fall from a horse on a steep track above Burnley, a death that the district found ironic, since he had been riding the same road for fifty years. He was buried near his mother. In the Slayerverse the Red Spindle is remembered as a patient man who turned a hillside into a net, and whose ledger entries, thin and exact, still hold together after five hundred years.