Emma Thorne Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Winter Latch. Craft: Night Trapping.

Emma Thorne Faulkner was born in 1845 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived fifty-four years as a farmer's wife and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the hills at the head of the Kentucky River. The family book knows her as The Winter Latch, a name that recalls the wooden bar on a farmhouse door and the season when it is most needed. She was a Spy, a hunter who learns the ground before she moves on it, and her craft was Night Trapping, the laying of snares for things that walk after dark. She was the younger daughter of the farmer and slayer Ninian Thorne, The Fallow Warden, and of the boarding-house keeper Effie Faulkner, and she trained under her father. Her elder sister was the herbalist Effie Thorne. She was called late, in 1877, and she was the first woman of the House of Thorne to be called in a hundred years. She died in 1899, in a fire set to draw her out, aged fifty-four, in the year that she also buried her sister. The fire was lit on a night in October, in the second week of the month, and the family has never agreed who lit it. The farmhouse stood at the top of a long stony lane, against a wooded ridge, with the barn below it, and on that night the barn went up first, with a sound like a door being slammed, and every dog on the hillside began to bark. It was a good trap. It took advantage of the one thing that a hill farmer could not leave, which was the stock, and of the one thing that a hunter could not refuse, which was the open door of an unlit house. She came out of the kitchen with a lantern, and saw that the barn was going, and that the horses were screaming, and she ran down the lane, and as she ran she counted the shadows on the hillside, because that was her craft, and she found that there was one too many. She went on. She let the horses out. She sent the hired boy up the hill with her sister's exercise book under his arm. Then she turned and went back up the lane towards the house, which had been set alight from behind, and which she did not leave. She was born in a back bedroom of the Putnam boarding house on Short Street, in Lexington, in the third week of March, because her mother, who had kept the kitchen there before her marriage, went down from the hills for every lying-in, and because Minnie Putnam, who ran the house, would have it no other way. Ninian, who came down with her, stayed in the passage with a saddlebag of horse-bills and was said by the lodgers to be the most silent new father they had ever seen. The child was a dark baby, with a great deal of black hair and a furious expression, who cried at the top of her voice at three in the morning and stopped the moment that she was carried to the window. She was taken home to the farm in a hamper at a month old, and grew up on a stony hillside, in a household that smelled of horses, bread and wet wool. She learned the hills. She learned where the paths ran, which fords would bear a horse and which a man, which fence lines had a gap and which gates had a squeak, and she learned, better than anyone on the ridge, what the valley sounded like at night. She could tell from the quality of a silence whether a fox or a man was in the hedge. She could tell a dog that was barking at nothing from a dog that was barking at something. By fourteen she was the only person on the farm whom the hounds would not follow, because she had made them lie down when she said so and stay there, and she sat them on the porch on the nights that her father was out. She had, at sixteen, her first unmistakable sense of what the family did. She saw him go out, with the hounds, in the dusk, in a dark cloak, and she watched him cross the pasture in the mist and disappear, and she understood that there was something in the world that he went to meet. The war found her at sixteen. The country around the farm was raided in the summers of 1862 and 1863, by Morgan's cavalry and by the Union patrols that went after him, and the inn became a hospital, and she, who was a tall, quiet girl with a steady hand, helped her sister with the bandages and stood at the gate with her father's rifle on the nights that a party came by. She was not afraid of men. She had been brought up to know that men could be reasoned with, or shot, and that it was the other kind of visitor that one had to think about. She discovered in the war that she had a gift for the wait, for lying in a ditch, in the dark, with a rifle, and letting a column go by. She kept her head. She also learned that a good trap is nine parts patience and one part a well-oiled latch. She married, some years after the war, a neighbouring farmer, whose name the family papers do not record, a widower on the next ridge, with a hundred acres and a pack of hounds, and she kept his house as she kept her father's, with a rifle by the door. It was a quiet marriage. He was a large, slow, courteous man, who took the view that a wife who went out at night had a reason, and who left the lamp in the window. She was not called. She was thirty-two, and she had been waiting for the thing for a number of years, and she was half persuaded, in the way of women of her family, that it had passed her by. It came in 1877, in the winter, at a neighbour's door. A farmer named Amos Tull, a hard, silent man of sixty who had lived a mile down the creek, had died in November, of a fever, and had been buried in the family plot behind his barn, and on the fourth night of December, in a bitter frost, he came home. His widow, who was a timid woman and had sat up that night with the lamp, heard a step on the porch. She opened the door an inch. It was her husband, in his Sunday coat, with frost on his shoulders, and he stood on the boards and looked at her in a mild, patient, mournful way, and did not come in. He asked her to ask him. She slammed the door and put the bar across, and ran, in her nightgown, up the creek path to the nearest light, which was Emma's. Emma, who had the rifle, went back with her. She did not go up to the house. She stood in the yard, in the snow, with the lantern shuttered, and watched the man on the porch, who was still waiting, and she saw exactly what he wanted and exactly what he could not do. She understood that he would stand there all night, and the next night and the next, because the house had been his own, and because the house had, since his death, been shut against him. She did a thing that no hunter of the Thornes had done before. She went in by the back way, and unbarred the front door, and lit the lamp, and left a chair by the fire. Then she stood behind the door, with her pistol and a silver-tipped stake, and waited, and said to the widow, from behind the wood, that she might ask him in. It was the work of half an hour. The man came in, and sat down in the chair by the fire, and the rest, she said afterwards, was arithmetic. She did it cleanly. She found, as she stood in the room with the dead man's coat at her elbow and a stake in her hand, that she was perfectly calm, in the way that a person is when a thing that has been baffling her for years suddenly makes sense. She went home in the morning and told her father. He was sixty-two, and ill, and he sat down on the porch and said that he had been wondering when. Ninian taught her for what was left of the winter. He had only a few weeks. He taught her the mist, which she had, and then, because she had a different gift, he let her go her own way, and she developed it into Night Trapping, the craft of setting a snare in the dark for a thing that would walk into it on its own legs. She used latches, lamps, open doors and the terms of hospitality that a vampire will keep, which a Thorne of Bourbon County, Hob Proctor Thorne, was teaching the family's hunters at about the same time. She made the dark into a room with one way in. He died in February 1878, of heart failure, after a last hunt on the ridge behind the house, and she took up his pistol and his silver-tipped stakes. She worked that spring and summer in the hills and hollows of three counties, and took eleven vampires in a season, which was more than her father had done in a decade. The family always believed that the fire was meant for her, and that it was set by a man, for a thing that she had taken. She died in the ruin of the farmhouse, in October, in the place that she had guarded, and was found in the morning by the hired boy, who had come back with the book. She was buried on the hill, beside her sister, and the hounds, who had been at the far end of the pasture, lay down on the grave. Emma Thorne Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Winter Latch, the farm-wife of the Kentucky hills, the hunter who made the dark into a room with one door. In the Slayerverse she stands for the trappers of the Red Ledger, the slayers who won with patience and preparation, and who lit the lamp, barred the door and waited for the thing to choose its own way in.