Effie Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Effie Faulkner was born in 1812 in Lexington, Kentucky, and kept a boarding house for more than forty years in the horse country of the Bluegrass. She was the elder daughter of the printer and vampire slayer Jacob Brewster Faulkner, known as The Fallow Bridle, and of the boarding-house keeper Abigail Putnam of Newburyport, and the sister of the slayer Anna Faulkner. She married the farmer and slayer Ninian Thorne, of the border House of Thorne, in 1840, and raised two daughters with him, Effie Thorne and Emma Thorne Faulkner, the second of whom became a slayer. She carried the Faulkner name into the Kentucky branch of the Thornes. She died in 1890 of kidney failure, at seventy-eight, having kept house through the Civil War in a state that was split down the middle, and having fed, by her own estimate, some fifteen thousand guests and several hundred hunters. She was born in Lexington by an accident of her father's work. In the autumn of 1811 the Red Ledger asked Jacob Brewster Faulkner to go west for a season and set up a small press at Lexington, which was then the printing capital of the western country, and to use it as a base for a hunt that was said to be going badly in the Bluegrass. He was twenty-eight, newly married and a little restless. His wife Abigail, who was expecting, would not be left behind with the Newburyport boarding house in the hands of a cousin, and she went with him, across the mountains by wagon, in the worst weather of the year. Their daughter was born in a rented room off Main Street in the spring, in the week that news came of the declaration of war against Great Britain. By the summer of 1813 the hunt was finished and the family was on its way home to Massachusetts. Effie remembered nothing of Kentucky, except a story that she had been carried over the Alleghenies in a hat box. She grew up in Newburyport, at the boarding house on Water Street, in a household of sailors, shipwrights and riggers, with a mother who ran the place like a ship and a father who came and went at odd hours with a bag. Her younger sister Anna was born in 1815. The two were brought up side by side in the dining room, among the lodgers, and from an early age they were a pair of opposites. Anna was sharp and dark and quick, and took to her father's work with enthusiasm. Effie was fair and unhurried and practical, and took to her mother's. She could lay a table for twenty at eight years old. At ten she could carve. At twelve she was running the linen room, with a long list of the week's sheets in her head, and by fifteen she was doing the marketing on her own, in a blue sunbonnet, with a basket on her arm and a good deal of firmness in her voice. She learned, in the course of it, a great deal about people. A boarding house, she used to say, was the best school of human nature in the world. One saw everyone at breakfast. A man's temper, his habits, his debts, his health and his secrets were all there on the table, in the way he took his coffee and the way he looked at the door. She liked people, which her mother did not always, and she had a disposition to see the best in them, which her mother regarded as a weakness and her father as a trade secret. It was Effie who could coax the news out of the silent lodger in the back room. It was Effie who noticed that the young man from Portsmouth never came down before noon. She reported it to her father, who said that she had a fine eye. Her father's death in 1830, in an ambush on a lonely road, when she was eighteen, was the great shock of her youth. She had known, vaguely, what he did, in the way that one knows about a family's debts. She now learned it in full. Her mother told her, on the night of the funeral, sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded, and added that she could go or stay. She said that Anna had already made up her mind. Effie, who was not a hunter and knew it, said that she thought she would go west. She had never seen the place where she was born, and she had a notion that she should. She went in the spring of 1833, at twenty-one, by the stage and the canal and the Ohio packet, to Lexington, where her mother's cousins, the Putnams, kept a house for travellers on Short Street. They took her in. She found the town very different from what she had been led to expect. It was a handsome, leafy, leisurely place of brick mansions, college buildings and stone-walled horse farms, with a public square, a large market and a great many taverns, and its people, who liked to think of themselves as the Athens of the West, were courteous and slow. She took a position at the Putnams' house, and within a year she was running its kitchen. In those years she became a figure of the town. She was a tall, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a wide face, blue eyes and a low, sweet voice, and she had a manner that made strangers feel at once that they were welcome. She set a good table. Her hams were famous. So were her batter bread, her pickled peaches and the gravy that she served with the fried chicken on Sundays. The horsemen who came to Lexington for the sales, the drovers, the lawyers who came for the assizes, the professors, the preachers and the politicians all found their way to her house, and in the course of their stay, without knowing it, told her everything. It was in 1839 that she met Ninian Thorne. He was a farmer from the hills of eastern Kentucky, twenty-four, tall, lean and sandy-haired, with the reserve of the border people, who had come down to a horse sale and taken a room at the house. He ate very little, said nothing and sat in the corner of the dining room with his back to the wall. She asked him, on the third evening, whether he found the food unsatisfactory. He said that it was the best he had eaten. She asked why he ate so little. He said that he was watching the door. It was, she said afterward, the most honest thing that a man had ever told her at table. He was a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne, an ancient family of border reivers from the Northumbrian marches who had long since turned their talents to the hunt, and the watchfulness that she had taken for shyness was the habit of his house. They were married in 1840, in the Presbyterian church, and moved to a farm on the Kentucky River, a day's ride from the town, where he raised horses and she ran a small inn for drovers and hunters. She had, in effect, two establishments. The farm supplied the provisions. The inn, which took in travellers on the Lexington road, supplied the news. Her daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Effie Thorne was born in 1843 and lived until 1899, and Emma Thorne Faulkner was born in 1845 and lived until 1899, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The two girls were brought up in the inn. They carried trays, made beds and kept an eye on the guests, and they learned, from their father and from the strangers who came to the door, to keep quiet about what they saw. They died in the same year, Effie Thorne in the spring of cancer and Emma Thorne Faulkner in the autumn in a fire set to draw her out, as though they had agreed to it. The Civil War divided Kentucky. The state, which remained officially in the Union, sent men to both armies, and in the summers of 1862 and 1863 the country around her farm was raided by Confederate cavalry under Morgan and by Union patrols in reply. She fed them all. She fed them in the kitchen, in the yard, on the porch, in the barn, and she managed, through some combination of pie and firmness, to keep her house and her horses, and her husband, out of the war. She used to say that a full plate was the best flag in the country. Ninian died in 1878, of heart failure after a winter hunt, and she kept the place going alone for twelve years. She took in guests until the last summer, though she had by then given up the cooking. She died in the spring of 1890, at seventy-eight, of kidney failure, in the room over the kitchen, and the people of three counties came to her funeral, most of them on foot. Effie Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the landlady of the Bluegrass, the daughter who carried the name west. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the Red Ledger's inns and boarding houses, the hospitable women at whose tables the long war was talked over and whose doors were never locked against a hunter.