Fanny Eaton

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Wren. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Fanny Eaton was born in 1842 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived sixty-seven years as a boarding-house keeper and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Proud Wren, a name that fits a small, loud, upright bird that nests in every gap in a wall and will not be moved from any of them. She was a Spy, which in the Faulkner sense means a hunter who learns before she acts, and her craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the following of a quarry over days and weeks by keeping a steady watch instead of making a chase. She was the younger daughter of the boatman Charles Eaton and of the seamstress and slayer Mary Lowry Faulkner, The Hollow Rook, and she trained under her mother. She had an elder sister, Georgia Faulkner. In 1866 she married the farmer Edwin Lord, and they raised two sons, Charles Faulkner Lord and Charles Faulkner, the first of whom became a slayer. She died in 1909 of a long illness, aged sixty-seven. She was born in Lexington by a piece of arithmetic. Her mother had been expected to lie in at the cottage on the bluff at Louisville, but Charles Eaton had taken a flatboat of barrels down to New Orleans in the early spring and was not due back for five weeks, and the child, in the way of the family, arrived a little ahead of anyone's calendar. Mary Lowry Faulkner, who disliked an empty house at such a time, went up on the stage to Short Street, where her kinswoman Minnie Putnam kept a boarding house for the Red Ledger's western cousins, and was put to bed in the back bedroom above the kitchen. Fanny was born on a wet night in the last week of March, with the lodgers eating supper underneath and the landlady's daughter Ellen, then three years old, sitting on the stairs with a doll, waiting for news. Minnie said afterwards that the baby had arrived into a room full of the smell of boiled ham, and that it had plainly made her mind up about boarding houses. It was a fair prophecy. Mary took her home to Louisville within the month, in a basket, on a packet with a friendly captain. Mary did not find her daughter an easy pupil. She had taught herself stillness by watching a pan of milk, and the girl could not keep her hands quiet for a minute together. It took a winter of evenings, with a lamp, a clock and a dish of dried peas that had to be sorted by size without being touched, before Fanny could sit through half an hour with her eyes on one point. She hated every evening of it. She also learned, to her own annoyance, that her gift was not her mother's. Mary watched a whole field at once. Fanny watched a single person for a long time, and she had a memory for habit that was nearly ridiculous: a man's hat, his way of counting change, which foot he favoured on a stair. It was closer to the craft of Silas Faulkner, an old cousin who had followed quarries for weeks on end across the state, and when the family book came to classify her it gave her his discipline, Long-Watch Tracking, and the plain title of a Spy. She was called in 1860, at eighteen, in a boarding house. Minnie Putnam had died that year of a fall, and Fanny, who had gone up to Lexington to help Minnie's daughter Ellen keep the house on Short Street for a season, was at the front desk on a slow afternoon in October when a lodger paid his week in advance. He was a thin, courteous man in an old-fashioned coat, and he counted the money onto the desk in silver dollars. She picked one up to ring it, as her aunt had taught her, and saw that it was dated 1795. The house had been built in 1811. The coin had not been in anyone's pocket since before the walls were up, and it was bright, without a scratch, as if it had been lying in a drawer, waiting. She looked at the man, and he looked at the coin, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all. She said that it was a pretty piece. He said that it had been a long time since anyone had remarked on it. Then he went upstairs, and she sat with her hands flat on the register and understood, with perfect calm, what she was for. She did not run, and she did not send for her mother. She watched. For eleven days she kept the front desk, the back stair and the landing window under a kind of quiet survey that nobody in the house noticed, and she kept a tally in the margin of the laundry book. The lodger did not come down to meals. His shutters were closed at noon and open at midnight. The cat would not go up the stair. On the eleventh evening she saw him go out, at a steady pace, on the road towards the horse farms, and she followed, at a distance, with her mother's second revolver in her apron pocket, to a stable yard three miles out where a groom had been missing for a week. Mary, who arrived on the night stage with a hat-box and a face like flint, found her sitting on a fence rail, with her skirts tucked up and the matter concluded. She had not yet learned to be afraid of it. That came later, and was put to use. The war found her in Louisville, where the army took over half the town and the boarding houses filled with officers, quartermasters, surgeons and riverboat pilots, and with men who said they were all three and were none. She took a lease on a tall brick house near the landing in 1862, the spring her father died, and kept it for forty-seven years. It was a clean house. She was proud of it, to the point of comedy, and held that a boarding house with a spot on its tablecloth would be remembered in the Ledger as a house with something to hide. The lodgers talked. It is the nature of a dining room, and Fanny, who had the listening gift of a dozen spies, sat at the end of the long table with the coffee pot and learned who was asking about whom. She took it up the bluff to her mother every Sunday, and wrote some of it in the green-backed book that she kept under the stair. She met Edwin Lord at the horse sales in the autumn of 1865. He was a farmer, twenty-three, born in Lexington, a lanky, unhurried, freckled man who kept a small horse farm on the Shelbyville road, east of the city, and who had come in to sell a bay colt and stayed for supper. He had never met a woman who asked him quite so many questions, and he answered them all, including the ones he did not know he was being asked. They were married in the spring of 1866, in the Presbyterian church at Louisville, and she went out to his forty acres on the Shelbyville road on her Sundays off, until the Sundays ran into the weekdays. He was not a hunter, and had no wish to be one. He carried a lantern, kept his counsel, and learned to put a cloth over the coffee pot when a late lodger came in. She told him what she was on the third night of the marriage. He thought about it for some time and said that it was unusual, but that it did explain the silver spoons. Their sons were born three years apart. Charles Faulkner Lord was born in 1869 and lived until 1948. He was a long, quiet, watchful boy, who sat under the dining-room table at four with a slate, tallying the lodgers, and who became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger like his mother and grandmother. Charles Faulkner was born in 1872 and lived until 1939. He did not hunt, and was entered in the family book, through a clerk's slip at his christening that nobody ever troubled to correct, without the Lord. Both boys were called for their grandfather. The family told them apart as Charlie Lord and Charlie Faulk, and they did not seem to mind. She took ill slowly. In her late fifties there was a tiredness that would not be argued with, and she gave up the stair, then the ledger, then the house, and went out to the farm on the Shelbyville road, where Edwin had built her a room with a wide window on the lane. Her aunt Rachel, who had outlived everyone she had ever quarrelled with, gave her the box of cloth squares that she had kept since the war, four hundred of them, each one a scrap of a lodger's sheet. She buried her mother, The Hollow Rook, in the winter of 1900, beside Charles Eaton, and was told by the undertaker that the old woman had died with a rug over her knees and her eyes on the river. She spent the last nine years of her own life at the window, watching the lane, and she was still keeping the tally of the carts on it the week she died. Fanny Eaton is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Proud Wren, the landlady of the Louisville landing, the keeper of a house in which every lodger was counted. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Spies of the Red Ledger who did their work at a dining table, with a coffee pot and a good memory, and for the patience of a woman who could watch a single man for eleven days without once being seen to look.