Helen Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Quiet Ford. Craft: Night Trapping.

Helen Faulkner was the child of a siege. Her mother, Anne Faulkner, born in 1615, had served during the civil war as a herbalist and physician's assistant in a besieged household in Lancashire, dressing wounds and boiling roots behind walls that cannon had cracked, and she carried the habits of that time all her life: she stored water, she counted stores, she slept lightly. Helen was born in 1654 in Lancaster, Lancashire, nine years after the fighting, to Anne and to Richard Marsden, a cooper born in 1612, who built casks and tubs in a yard below the castle. She had an elder sister, Judith Faulkner, born in 1639, and an elder brother, Josiah Faulkner, born in 1646, both of them slayers, and both of them by then old enough to treat their small sister as a kind of pet. Lancaster in the 1650s was a town of stone and slate, climbing a hill from the river Lune to the castle, with a quay where ships from the Indies and Virginia unloaded sugar and tobacco. The Commonwealth ruled, then the Restoration returned, and the town rocked between them, its Puritans and Royalists still measuring each other at market. Helen grew up in a cooper's yard smelling of oak shavings and hot iron hoops, and learned the trade of the loom instead, being apprenticed in her early teens to a weaver in one of the hand-loom villages nearby. The work was hard on the back and eyes. A weaver of that time sat at a heavy loom for ten or twelve hours, throwing the shuttle by hand and beating up the weft, and a good one could make eight or nine yards of woollen cloth in a week. Helen was good, with a quick, even rhythm and a habit of humming under her breath while she worked. She married Everard Clegg in 1684. He was a ferryman, five years younger than she, born in 1659, who worked a boat on the Lune, and the match caused a little talk because of the difference in age. It did not last long. Everard was cheerful, patient and reliable, and Helen had a sharp tongue and a plain dislike of fuss, and they suited each other. They took a cottage close to the river where the sound of his boat and the sound of her loom made a kind of duet all day. Their son Dennis Clegg was born in 1687. The household was modest, warm and noisy, and it was a happy one. In that same year, 1687, Helen was called, and became a vampire slayer. She was travelling home from a farm where she had gone to deliver a piece of cloth, walking on a lonely road as dusk came down, with her boy on her hip, when a coach came up behind her. It arrived with a driver on the box and no passengers, and it made no sound: no creak of leather, no jingle of harness. She pressed herself against the hedge with the child in her arms, and the coach drew level and stopped. The driver sat still, looking straight ahead, and the horses did not so much as breathe. What she felt then was not fear but a sudden, complete clarity, as though every sound and shadow on the road had been arranged in a pattern and she was the only one who could read it. She said afterward that it felt like finding the flaw in a bolt of cloth by the way it hung. She walked on, slowly, until the coach was out of sight, and then she ran. Her sister Judith took her in hand. As the elder slayer, Judith had the experience and the patience, and she taught Helen what Faulkner slayers had always taught: stillness first, then aim. Helen took the alias The Quiet Ford, from her habit of lying in wait at crossings of streams and lanes where the creatures had to pass, and her craft was Night Trapping, the setting of snares and lines and hidden lanterns across a route that a hunted vampire would have to use. It was a weaver's craft, at bottom: she thought of a road as a warp and of the trap as the weft that she laid across it. She carried a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, and she learned to load in the dark. The family classed her as a Hunter, and it was the plain word for what she was. The three years she had as a slayer were brief and full. She took nine vampires by the ledger's reckoning, five of them in the first winter, working the roads south and east of Lancaster with Judith and, when he was in the county, with her brother Josiah, who had spent years in Massachusetts and returned with tales of the colonies. Everard covered for her as a ferryman can, by taking her across the river by night without asking questions. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution changed the king and made a great stir, and Helen paid it the attention that a woman with a loom and two children and a nocturnal profession can spare, which was very little. Her daughter Katharine Faulkner was born in 1690, taking her mother's family name in the way the house had done for generations. The Faulkners kept the Red Ledger, and Helen kept it honestly. She had a Lancastrian's pride and a weaver's feeling for a fair count, and she liked the contest with the Yorkist ledger because it was a contest between two households of equals, each straining to write more than the other. When she heard the Proctors had raised their own tally in a given season, she was jealous in a small, comfortable way, and she said the Guest of Towton would be caught by whichever side had the better traps. It was a view that pleased her sister very much. She died in 1690 of wounds taken in a cellar hunt, aged 36, only months after Katharine was born. The vampire was hiding in the cellar of a deserted inn, and Helen had taken the lead into the dark, laying her lines across the stair; the creature came through them regardless and caught her in the chest and arm. She lived long enough to be carried home. Her mother Anne died in the same year, and the household was in mourning twice over. Everard raised the two children with the help of his sister-in-law, and lived until 1732; Dennis lived to 1726 and Katharine to 1745. In the Slayerverse Helen is remembered as a hunter of great promise cut short, a woman whose loom was silent by the third year of her calling. The Faulkners still tell how she once said that the best trap was the one nobody noticed was a trap, and the phrase is still taught to young hunters.