Florence Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sure Ferryman. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Florence Faulkner was two years old when her mother died, and she grew up with a single object to remember her by, a door-latch. It was an ordinary iron thumb-latch, forged at Padiham, where she was born in 1604, and it had been fitted to the cottage door by her mother, Sabina Faulkner, who was known in the Red Ledger as The Steady Latch because, so the story went, no creature that she had shut out of a house was ever known to get in. Sabina was a weaver and a vampire slayer, and she died in 1606 after one of her long nights. Florence's father, Godfrey Duckworth, born in 1579, was a land surveyor who had married into the Faulkner family without ever quite becoming used to it, and he raised the child alone, in a small stone house at the edge of the town, with a table covered in half-finished plans and a shelf of measuring rods. The name Faulkner came to Florence from her mother, in the family's custom, and never wavered. Padiham in those years was a small cloth town on the Calder, with a mill-race, a market cross, a church tower that could be seen from every hill, and a great many hand-looms working in the upper rooms of the cottages. Cold, wet weather came off the moors for much of the year; the oat harvest failed more than once; and the county was still full of old people who had been children when the Pilgrimage of Grace was talked of and who recognised in every bad winter the Lord's opinion of the age. Godfrey was a practical man and did not share the general belief in portents. What he did share, being now the guardian of a Faulkner daughter, was a private awareness that the moors and mosses hid more than sheep. He trained his child in what he knew, which was ground. She learned to pace out a furlong, to take a bearing by the sun and by a hill, and to read the country the way other children read the Bible. She was also taught, by an aunt and by a Faulkner cousin who came over from Whalley, to sew. It is a fact of some interest that the calling, when it came, found her with a needle in her hand. In the family's accounts, she became a seamstress at fourteen, taking in plain work for the neighbours and making shirts, shifts, aprons, and the rough linens of the town, and she was good at it, quick and neat, with a habit of testing every seam by pulling on it as if it might give. She would in later life be described as small and spare, with a straight back, grey eyes, a wide mouth that seldom moved, and a habit of standing very still, which the children of Padiham found either restful or alarming. Her calling came in 1620, when she was sixteen, on a late autumn evening. A neighbour, a carter named in the ledger only as the man from the mill lane, had been buried three days before. On the night of the third day he came back down the lane and stood in front of his own house, in his shroud, and would not come indoors. Neighbours who saw him from windows said that he seemed to be waiting for someone to ask him in, and that it was the waiting that was terrible. Florence, who had come out with a lantern to see what the noise was, understood in the moment that she alone in the street knew what he was. She understood, too, something that she could not have explained: the exact and quiet certainty that it was for her to bar the door against him, and that she was able. She did what her mother's latch was made for. She stood between the dead man and his threshold and would not let him in, and when he lunged, she had a hawthorn stake taken from the woodpile and drove it home. Godfrey found her sitting on the doorstep an hour later, still holding it, and said only that he supposed she would want her mother's things. Her training thereafter was in her own house and in her cousins'. The Faulkners of Lancashire did not run a school. They passed the work down by doing it, and Florence was taken out on hunts from the age of seventeen, learning what moorland tracks showed a foot that did not sink, what a churchyard looked like when a grave had been opened from within, and how the dead behaved at the edge of a village, which was to say patiently. She carried a flintlock pistol, one of the new French-style locks that were beginning to appear in the North, loaded with a ball cast from a pewter spoon, and she carried hawthorn stakes, cut in the correct season and hardened in the fire, in a sleeve of leather that she stitched herself. She trusted the pistol for distance and the stake for certainty. It was a combination for which the Faulkners had, by then, a settled opinion. The craft that made her famous in the ledger was Beacon Reading. The name came from the old chain of hilltop beacons that had once been used to warn of the Armada and of the Scots, several of which still stood on the moors above Padiham, and it described a habit of mind more than a device. Florence could stand on a summit at dusk and, by reading the pattern of lights in a valley, the lit windows, the shepherds' fires, the lanterns on a road, work out where something was moving that had no light of its own. A gap in a line of candles, a dark window in a row of lit ones, a dog silent where the others barked: she read these as a scholar reads a page. Her cousins called it a trick. The ledger called it a craft, and in time called her The Sure Ferryman, because she was the one who took people across dangerous ground safely and never lost a passenger. She led lost travellers off the marsh, escorted priests through the fog, and once guided an entire wedding party by night from a farm across the moss to a church, taking care to keep the bride's shoes dry. She married Tristram Bellingham in 1623, a surveyor as her father had been, and the family's laughter about this coincidence has never quite died. He was a patient, careful man who drew her maps and stayed awake for her return. Their daughters were Winifred Faulkner, born in 1624, and Verena Faulkner, born in 1628, and Florence raised them in the manner of her mother's house: taught them the latch and the needle, and taught them the map, and let them decide about the rest. Neither daughter took up the pistol. Both grew into capable, sober women, and both died before their mother, Winifred in 1665 and Verena in 1666, a grief that came late in Florence's life and which she is said to have borne with the same stillness with which she had borne the death of her husband in 1645. That earlier loss changed her hunting less than it changed the rest of her life. She went on through the years of the civil wars, when Lancashire was fought over and the moors were full of deserters, and a hunter might just as easily be mistaken for a Roundhead scout as for a witch. The Red Ledger records her tallies in those years without comment, in a plain hand, a mark for each take, and the total across her working life stands high among the women of the line. It is said that when she met a Proctor hunter on the Yorkshire border in the 1650s, a gaunt man of about her own age on a grey mare, she told him that the Faulkner tally would beat his by Michaelmas and that he was welcome to check. He did, and it did. In 1674, at seventy, she took a fever in the early winter and died of it in her own bed at Padiham, in the house where she had been born. The Red Ledger's closing note is a short one, reading that the Ferryman had made her last crossing. Her latch, her mother's, still hung on the door, and it is preserved in the Faulkner collection; her stakes were divided among her granddaughters. In the Slayerverse she is treated as the model of a quiet, exact kind of slayer, one whose work began with looking, and whose signature was that nobody she guided ever failed to arrive.