George Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The True Seal. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

George Faulkner was born in 1637 in Bolton, Lancashire, in a cooper's yard behind Deansgate where the smell of fresh oak shavings hung over the puddles and the hammering began at first light. His father was Abraham Faulkner, born in 1611, a cooper by trade and a vampire slayer by inheritance, known in the Red Ledger as The Amber Tally for the honey-coloured ink he used and the steady, unhurried way he filled the columns. His mother was Olive Duckworth, born in 1614, a weaver, who worked a hand loom in the front room and whose shuttle could be heard through the wall at all hours. Bolton was a fustian town, its people making cloth of linen and cotton on looms in their own cottages, and the household lived among the clatter of trades and the sing-song of the pack-horse drivers, the whole town smelling of wet wool, peat smoke and river mud. He was a boy of five when the civil wars reached Lancashire, and Bolton's part in them was terrible. The town was a Puritan stronghold, and in 1644 the Royalist army under Prince Rupert stormed it, with a slaughter the townspeople never forgot. George was seven, and he remembered, or said he remembered, the sound of the drums and the way his mother held him under the loom while the streets outside ran. The Faulkner ledger records that Abraham, as a Lancastrian of the Red Ledger, had no love for the Roundhead town he lived in and none for the prince who broke it, and the household kept to itself and to its cellar. It was a lesson in how ordinary people are ground between armies, and it shaped the boy's view of the world: he became a serious, watchful child who counted the exits of any room he entered. He was apprenticed as a saddler at thirteen, and served his time with a master near the market cross, learning to cut hides, stitch with waxed thread and fit a tree to a horse's back. It was a good trade in a county of carriers and drovers, and a saddler who could mend a bridle by lamplight was never short of work. In the evenings he was taught the other trade. His father, the coopers' ledger-keeper, began to take him out onto the moors above the town, showing him how to read a track in wet peat and how to seat a stake in the hand so that it would not slip. Abraham was his mentor and, in George's own account, a patient, exacting one. The lesson he repeated most was that a tally is worth nothing if it is not true. The calling came in 1654, when George was seventeen. A neighbouring household, a family of carriers with a house on the Halliwell road, had failed to appear at church for two Sundays, and George was sent, with a boy's errand, to knock. Nobody answered. He went round to the back and let himself into the cellar, where the stores were found untouched, the barrels sealed and the cheeses on their shelves, and the household gone. There was no blood and no disorder, only a lamp still burning low and a stillness that made the hair rise on his arms. He understood, standing in the cold with the apples in their racks, what the family's talk of the dark meant, and something in him turned over and settled. He walked home and told his father, who did not need to be told. From that day he was a vampire slayer, and the ledger gives his alias as The True Seal, since he was afterwards known for sealing a cellar, a cellar door and a line of argument with equal finality. His craft, Hawthorn Craft, was in its origin an extension of the saddler's skill. He worked with the wood as he worked with leather, choosing a stake from a hedge in winter, drying it slowly, shaving it to a point and binding the grip with waxed thread so that it sat in the palm like the handle of an awl. He knew which hedges grew the straightest wood and which berries carried the most weight, and he kept a bundle in the shop under the harness as a matter of routine. His gear was a flintlock pistol and those stakes, and in the Hunter's way he preferred to work at a place he had studied rather than one he had stumbled into, tracking a creature to its lair and choosing the moment. He recorded fourteen entries in the Red Ledger before he was thirty, an unusually clean tally, and his father's amber ink gave way to his own black. In 1664 he married Alice Tattersall, a housekeeper from Garstang who had come to Bolton in service, and the match proved the steadiest thing in his life. She took over the accounts of the shop and the discipline of the house, and he told her the family secret before the wedding. Their daughters, Agatha Tattersall Faulkner and Edith Tattersall Faulkner, were born in 1665 and 1667, and the family's habit of passing the name through the mother's side gave both girls the Tattersall in the middle. His younger sister, Edith Faulkner, born in 1640, was also a slayer and often hunted with him, so that on certain nights the house would empty of its adults and the elder daughter would be left in charge of the kettle. The great plague year of 1665 found him with a newborn and a market half-closed, and he spent that summer patrolling the cart roads on the edge of the town, watching for whatever preyed on quarantined houses. His mother, Olive, died in 1668, and Abraham went on hunting long past the age when most men stopped, his mentor's hand passing to the son by degrees. George was a cautious rival to the Proctors, as the Faulkner men often were. He wrote to the White Ledger's keepers at Leeds now and then to compare counts, and he was known to cross a hillside to help a Yorkshire hunter, provided the Yorkshireman did not gloat about it afterwards. On the matter of the Guest, the vampire who slipped away at Towton in 1461, he held the family opinion firmly, that the escape had been the fault of the other side, and he was not a man to be argued out of it. But he kept the rivalry in its proper place, as a contest of tallies, and he noticed that the Proctors kept theirs with a similar exactness. Alice died in 1675, in an accident on the fells, and the loss was the great blow of his life. He raised the girls with his sister's help and went on working, though the ledger notes that his entries grew shorter and his hunts closer to home. The men who worked with him said he went quiet in the way that a saddler goes quiet when a strap has snapped, all the stitches accounted for and nothing to be done. He lived on into the reign of a king he did not much like, and he died in 1685, aged forty-eight, in an accident on the fells, the same hills that had taken his wife. His father Abraham, by a bitter coincidence, died the same year. The True Seal is remembered in the Red Ledger as a careful hunter and a faithful husband. His stakes, according to the family, were still in use two generations afterwards, and his name recurs in the accounts of the Slayerverse wherever a cellar is found unopened and a household is missing.