Edwin Lord

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

Edwin Lord was born in 1842 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived sixty-nine years as a farmer who bred and broke horses on a small place east of Louisville. He married the boarding-house keeper and vampire slayer Fanny Eaton in 1866, and they raised two sons, Charles Faulkner Lord and Charles Faulkner, the elder of whom became a slayer of the Red Ledger like his mother. Edwin did not hunt. He was not born to the Faulkner line and did not pretend to belong to it, but for forty-three years he was the husband of one of its Spies, and what he gave the Ledger in return was a quiet paddock, a stable with a back door, and a string of the fastest horses on the Shelbyville road. He died in 1911 of kidney failure, at sixty-nine, two years after his wife, in the room she had chosen for him at the front of the house. Lexington in 1842 was the horse capital of the West and knew it. The Bluegrass country around the town had been settled within living memory, its limestone pastures were already famous, and the great farms of the Ashland and Woodburn estates sent thoroughbreds to every racecourse between Louisville and New Orleans. Edwin's people were not of that order. His father, whom the papers call only a Lord, worked as a groom and then as a trainer's foreman on one of the larger farms, and his mother, equally unrecorded, took in sewing for the wives of the stud grooms. The family rented three rooms above a harness maker's shop on the Richmond road, and the boy grew up with the smell of saddle soap in his clothes and the sound of hooves on cobbles in his sleep. By six he could lead a yearling. By ten he was riding exercise gallops on the colts too light for the men, and he was said to have the best pair of hands in the district, which is a compliment to a horseman that nothing else in life quite matches. He was a freckled, sandy, loose-limbed boy, and he spoke so little that his mother feared for his wits. She need not have done. He was listening, in the way of a man who works with animals that cannot answer, and he learned to hear a horse's mind through its ears, its breathing and the set of its hind legs. He taught himself, at twelve, to cure a colic with a rolled blanket and a long walk, and at fifteen he was taken on by a breeder on the Paris pike as a full hand, at a dollar a week and his dinner. He saved it. He said that he meant to have his own paddock by twenty-five, and he did. The war found him at eighteen. Kentucky, which had declared itself neutral and then been pulled in by both sides, was a dangerous place for a young man with a good eye for a horse, because both armies wanted every animal in the state. He did not go to either. His father, who had a weak chest, needed him at home, and he spent the first two years of the war doing what every farmer of the Bluegrass did, which was hiding stock. In July 1862 the Confederate cavalry of John Hunt Morgan swept into Lexington and took what they could find, and Edwin, who had had a warning from a stable boy, led eleven of his master's mares through a creek bed at night to a cave on a neighbour's farm and kept them there for nine days, feeding them with oats carried in his coat. The mares were all recovered. His master gave him twenty dollars and a saddle, and said that he had never seen a young man so calm in a crisis, which Edwin thought was a little unjust, since he had been terrified. He went into business for himself in 1865, at twenty-three, on forty acres of thin land on the Shelbyville road, east of Louisville, bought with his savings and a loan from a retired colonel who liked his manner. It was not the best pasture, but it had a good spring and a sound barn. He rented a pair of mares, bought a colt and set about making a horse farm in the plain, stubborn way that most of the new farms of the postwar years were made. He sold his first bay colt at the Louisville horse sales that autumn, for a price that astonished him. He stayed on in town for supper at the house of a cousin, and was put beside a small, dark, brisk young woman in a grey dress, with a pair of eyes that seemed to be counting the spoons. It was Fanny Eaton, and she asked him eleven questions before the soup was finished. Who was his father? Where did he keep his horses? How many hands did he employ? Did he drink? Who had told him about the creek bed? He answered every one, and some he did not know he was answering, and at the end of the meal she asked if she might see the farm. She came out on the Sunday, in a hired buggy, and walked the paddocks with him for three hours, and looked carefully at the gates, the lane and the barn, all of which he thought she was admiring. She was not. She was calculating how many persons could come and go by the back of the place without being seen from the road. They were married in the spring of 1866, in the Presbyterian church at Louisville, with her mother Mary Lowry Faulkner in a dark blue dress in the front pew and her aunt Rachel in a larger one behind. Edwin, who had stood so easily in front of a wall of Confederate horsemen, was so nervous that he dropped the ring and had to be helped to find it under the choir stalls. His wife, the family said, put her foot on it. She told him what she was on the third night. He took it, in the end, as he took most things, slowly and with a good grace. He said that he had wondered about the spoons. He said that he did not know much about vampires, but that he knew a great deal about what it is to be afraid of a thing that cannot be seen, which was what most horses spent their lives doing, and that it had always seemed to him the decent thing to be the kind of man a frightened animal could trust. She looked at him for some time. She said that she had never heard it put that way. After that, the paddock on the Shelbyville road was a safe place in the Ledger's Kentucky country, and the back of his barn had, in addition to the usual stalls, a loft with a bed, a lamp and a locked trunk. He was never a hunter, and had, he said, neither the nerve nor the temper for it. What he had was a pair of hands and a gift of trust, and he put them to use. He kept two fast horses saddled at the back of the stable, all the year round, for any hunter who needed to be across the county in an hour. He lent a mare to a cousin of the Ledger who was being followed on the Frankfort pike, and did not ask for her back. He learned to shoe at night, without a lantern, and to bed a horse in the dark, and he grew so good at quieting a nervous animal that a pair of hounds once lay down at his feet in the barn and would not be shifted. His wife, who had the highest opinion of her own judgement, said that he was the only man she knew who was never wrong about a horse. Their sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Charles Faulkner Lord was born in 1869 and lived until 1948. He sat on the fence rail with his father from the age of three, learned to ride before he learned to read, and was called in due course to be a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, taught by his mother in the boarding house and by his father in the stable. Charles Faulkner was born in 1872 and lived until 1939. He did not hunt. He had his father's hands and became, in his turn, a horseman, a patient man who kept the farm going on the Shelbyville road after the old people were gone. Both boys were named for their grandfather Charles Eaton, and Edwin, who found it a little confusing, said that it made the ledger easier, since one had only to look at the horse to know which son was on it. When Fanny fell ill, in her late fifties, he gave up the colts and stayed beside her. He built on a room at the front of the house, with a wide window on the lane, and set her chair in it, so that she could watch the road. He said that it was the least he could do for a woman who had once counted his spoons. She died in the autumn of 1909, of a long illness, and he buried her at Louisville beside her father, with the two sons on either side of him and a great many hunters at the back of the church, a good number of whom he knew only by the horses they had ridden. He lived two years more, in the room at the front of the house, with her chair by the window and a rug on his knees. He looked at the lane each morning. He died in the spring of 1911, of kidney failure, at sixty-nine, and was found by his younger son at dawn, sitting up in bed, with his hand on the window sill, as if he had heard a horse. Edwin Lord is remembered in the Faulkner family as the horse-farmer of the Shelbyville road, the husband who kept a good horse saddled at the back. In the Slayerverse he stands for the partners of the Red Ledger who did not hunt, and who were worth a dozen hunters to the hunters who needed, at two in the morning, somewhere to go and a fast animal to get there.