Elyn Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Wild Mantle. Craft: Quarry Reading.

The face was in the crowd on a market day in Rochdale in 1618, and Elyn Faulkner knew it at once, because she had stood at that person's graveside. She was twenty-three. She had been born in 1595 in that Lancashire wool town and raised in a saddler's house, and until that moment she had believed, as most people did, that the dead stayed where the sexton had put them. She watched the face move between the stalls, unhurried, browsing like anyone else, and she understood in a rush that her family's habit of carrying a stave to the churchyard had never been about grief. It was the calling, and it came to her in the smell of cattle, cheese and wet cloth, in the middle of the busiest morning of the week. She was the elder of two daughters of William Faulkner and Lydia Braithwaite. Her father, a saddler born in 1576, was a vampire slayer of the Lancastrian line, known in the Red Ledger by the alias The Thorn Tally, and her mother, born in 1573, was a dressmaker, a small, brisk woman who could turn a length of broadcloth into a gown in an evening and who did not permit her husband's business to interfere with her pins. The household stood on a street off the market place, with the saddle-shop in front, the sewing table behind, and a yard where hides hung to dry. Elyn's sister Lydia was born in 1596, the year after her. The two girls shared a bed, a set of chores, and later a grief. William Faulkner died in 1607, when Elyn was twelve. The family remembered him as a big, quiet man with a shaggy beard and a great deal of dry humour, who taught his daughters their letters at the workbench between jobs and who came home some nights with his knuckles skinned and his boots stained and said only that he had been out on the moors. He was, in the language of the ledger, a man who kept his tally honestly, and it was said in Rochdale that the Faulkner shop was one of the few places where an honest man could get a sound girth and an honest answer. After his death the saddlery passed out of the family's hands into those of a journeyman, and Lydia Braithwaite took in more sewing, and the household grew narrow. Elyn had no thought at that age of following her father; she had barely taken in that he had a second life. Her mother's health went slowly. Lydia Braithwaite died in 1616, and at twenty-one Elyn was the head of a household of two, herself and her younger sister. She found employment as a housekeeper to a well-off Rochdale family, a role that she filled with the sharp efficiency that ran in her, managing servants, keeping accounts, supervising the linen and the larder, and reporting to a mistress who found her indispensable and slightly frightening. The work suited her. A housekeeper in a substantial Lancashire house of that time held keys to every room and knew what every servant, tradesman and visitor was doing. It was also, though she did not yet know it, a training in the very thing she would later do best: watching a house full of people and noticing who was out of place. Her craft, when it came, was Quarry Reading. It was a skill of the eye more than the arm: the ability to look at a person or a place and see what was wrong with it, the wrong tilt of a head, the unwashed hem on a woman who claimed to have walked in from a farm, the absence of breath-steam on a cold morning. Elyn started to practise it on the market day of her calling, and refined it over the following fourteen years. She learned the hours a quarry kept, the places it fed, and the small vanities by which it tried to pass as living. She was assigned the Spy archetype by the Faulkners, since her hunting was mostly done in the guise of an ordinary woman with a shopping basket, listening at the edge of a conversation with a face that gave nothing away. Her gear was the family's traditional flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, carried in the deep pockets of a long mantle cut by her mother's old pattern. The mantle gave her her alias. It was a heavy dark cloak, lined with wool, and when she strode through the market or over the Pennine tops with it flying behind her, she looked, according to a Rochdale weaver, like a storm looking for somewhere to break. The Wild Mantle, they called her in the trade, a name she found funny and did not object to. She was, in reality, not wild at all. She was cold, patient and rather severe, a woman who dressed plainly, spoke little and walked fast, and whose one indulgence was a scarlet ribbon at the neck of her working dress. She never married, and the family took this to be her choice. There had been offers, from a chandler and a young clerk of the town, and she rejected them politely on the plain ground that no husband could be given a housekeeper's hours and a hunter's nights at once without noticing. Her closest attachment remained her sister Lydia, who lived nearby and knew what she did. Lydia kept her secrets, mended her cloak, and sat up with her when a night's work went badly. The two of them made a small, private council in a town of some three thousand people, with Elyn hunting and Lydia teaching children their letters and rumours of the world going back and forth between them across the kitchen table. The place and time pressed on them both. Lancashire in the 1620s was a county of hand-looms, small farms and hard religion, with Puritan preachers in the pulpits of the market towns and recusant families keeping their heads down in the villages. The winters were bitter, the price of oats climbed, and the fever that moved through the poorer streets of Rochdale in the plague years was never far off. The vampires of the district took advantage of it as any predator does of a weakened herd, and Elyn's ledger entries from those years read like a sequence of small disasters averted: an alehouse cellar cleared, a family saved on the moor road, a curate found dead in a lane and, three nights later, found again. She was accurate, sparing and firmly on the Lancastrian side; the Red Ledger records her tally in a small, even hand, and she took the old quarrel with the Proctors as a matter of professional interest rather than anger. She felt no need to see the Guest of Towton avenged and thought it more useful to keep her own book straight. Her end came in 1632, in a churchyard, from a blow she took there. She was thirty-seven. The details are thin, as they usually are when the only witnesses are the dead: a hunt that ran late, a familiar face, a graveyard at night with the yew trees black against the sky. She was struck down from behind and lay in the wet grass until morning. The sexton found her. Lydia Faulkner buried her sister, and it was noted by the parish clerk that the mourners were few and the coffin plain. In the Slayerverse the Wild Mantle is remembered as the sharpest eye of her generation on the Lancashire side, and the family still recites the way she spotted her first quarry, in a crowd, on a market day.