Hannah Hutchinson Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sure Latch. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Hannah Hutchinson Faulkner was born in 1736 at Andover, Massachusetts, and was called to the work of a vampire slayer at seventeen, in 1754, in a stable where the horses screamed and the groom was found cold. She kept the farmer's wife's trade of dairy, garden and household, though the Faulkner records show no husband for her, and she became known to the Red Ledger as The Sure Latch, a soldier by disposition whose craft was Long-Watch Tracking. She died in 1807 at seventy-one, of the sickness the old people called the sweating sickness, having outlived every one of her contemporaries but her brother. Her father, Benjamin Mather Faulkner, born in 1712, was a circuit preacher who rode the country roads of Essex and Middlesex counties, and who kept the Red Ledger under the alias The Wary Ledger. He was a thin, watchful man who trusted numbers more than sermons and who set down each hunt in a small oilcloth book. Her mother, Charity Hutchinson, born in 1710, was a midwife, and the house in Andover was full of the kind of talk that goes with that trade, women arriving at odd hours and leaving before dawn, hot water, linen and lowered voices. Hannah had a younger brother, Joshua Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1739, who never felt the calling and grew up to be the family's link to ordinary life, a man who kept books and ledgers of the dull kind and who could be relied upon to tell her when she was working too hard. Andover in the 1740s was a town of orchards, sawmills and long Sabbaths. The meetinghouse stood on the green with the militia training field beside it, and the roads were rutted, seasonal and often impassable in March. Hannah learned to milk before she learned her letters, and learned her letters from her mother's receipt books, in which remedies for childbed fever sat next to careful notes on unnatural deaths. Her father died in 1747, when she was eleven, killed by a fall on an icy road according to the household's own telling, and her mother followed in 1751. By fifteen she was running the household for her small brother, working a rented garden and a few cows, and hiring out for haying in season. She was called in 1754, at the outset of the French war. It was a wet spring evening, and she had gone to the stable of a neighbouring farm to fetch a borrowed bridle. The horses were in a state she had never seen, kicking at their stalls, eyes rolling white, and the groom, a boy she knew slightly, lay in the straw as cold as a stone though he had been warm at noon. In the dim light something moved along the far wall. She seized a hay fork, which was the only weapon to hand, and held the doorway until a farmhand came running with a lantern. The thing left through a broken board. She did not sleep that night, but by morning she had decided what she was, and she wrote it in her mother's book in plain words. She took up her father's long rifle and learned from his oilcloth book. There was no mentor, and she made herself into a soldier the hard way. She drilled with the local militia's musket practice, borrowing a place in the line under her brother's name, and she learned to shoot, load and retreat in good order. She kept to a regimen of early rising and cold water, and a strict rule that a hunt began and ended at a fixed hour. Her method was that of the trained infantry, formal and methodical, and it differed sharply from the flair of some of her cousins. Her craft, Long-Watch Tracking, was patient, and she used it in the way of a sentry: choosing a post, holding it, and counting. The stories the Red Ledger preserves of her are mostly quiet ones. One tells how she held a mill dam for three nights against something that came out of the millpond, and how the miller never learned why his wheel stopped and started. Another records a single silver-cast shot fired at a hundred paces through the rain, at a figure on the crest of a plough field, which the diarist notes was her only shot that week. Neighbours thought her a serious woman with a farm to run, a good hand with cheese and a sharp tongue at market. The Sure Latch was her name in the ledger because she was the one who closed the door behind a settled matter, and because she never left a latch open. She never married, though the entry that lists her occupation as a farmer's wife puzzled later archivists. The likeliest explanation, offered by descendants, is that the phrase was a courtesy title, the ordinary description of a woman who ran a working farmstead and answered for its hands and beasts, whatever her marital state. She kept the household on a hillside farm at the edge of Andover, employed two hired men and a girl, and managed a small dairy that supplied cheese to the coastal towns. Her brother Joshua lived nearby and checked her accounts, and she trusted him with everything except the truth, which she kept to herself, at least until late in life. The Revolution brought soldiers to her door, first in search of provisions and later in search of shelter. She fed them and asked nothing in return, and in the spring of 1775 she sat up with a wounded militiaman who had walked from Concord. She spoke little of politics, though she had a low opinion of Boston merchants on both sides. Her dealings with the Proctors were remote, conducted through her father's old correspondents, and she regarded the rivalry as a matter of book-keeping in which she had no personal stake. When a Proctor letter asked her about the Guest of Towton, she replied that she had never met the man and that the question seemed to her a good deal less urgent than the fence at the bottom of her hill. In her seventies she still walked her boundaries each morning, rifle across her arm, with the weather written on her face. She was taken ill in the summer of 1807 with a fever the country people called the sweating sickness, and she died within days, at seventy-one. Joshua saw to the burial, and the Red Ledger records her final tally in her own hand. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the soldier of the Andover Faulkners, an orphan who made herself into the steadiest sentry of her generation.