Jeremy Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Rook. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Jeremy Faulkner, the vampire slayer whom the Red Ledger calls The Proud Rook, was born in 1682 in Andover, Massachusetts, in a farmhouse beside the Shawsheen River that his father had built with his own hands out of the timber of the first lot. He was the third child of a large and busy household. His father, Josiah Faulkner, born in 1646, was the son of a woman named Anne and had crossed the Atlantic in the 1670s with the Red Ledger sewn into the lining of his coat, so that the whole tally of the Lancastrian line, back to Hugh Faulkner's first entry in 1455, had come to New England against his ribs. His mother, Phoebe Ingersoll, born in 1645, was a weaver who set her loom in the long room off the kitchen and who taught the children their psalms in time to the beat of the batten. Josiah was himself a slayer, known as the Andover Hound for his relentless tracking, and the boy grew up in a house where the ledger was a family document, taken out on winter evenings and read aloud by the fire. Two older siblings were living when he was born, and one more came after him. Nathaniel Faulkner, born in 1668, was fourteen years older and by the time Jeremy was old enough to notice him was already a slayer. Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678, was a bright, practical girl who would marry into Marblehead. Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, born in 1685, was the baby, a cheerful boy with an early gift for making things, and he would become a cooper. The brothers were close, though their natures could hardly have been more different, and their mother kept the peace among them with a raised eyebrow. He was ten in 1692, the summer that Andover became one of the centres of the witchcraft panic that gripped the colony. The town had more accusations than any other place but Salem, and the county jail filled with neighbours, some of them Faulkner cousins by marriage. The household lived through it in an awkward position. Josiah's work meant that the family knew there were real monsters in the dark, and it made them, if anything, more horrified at the spectacle of good people being hanged for imaginary ones. Jeremy watched his father, who was a stern and unspeaking man, come home from the meeting at the church and sit for an hour without taking off his hat. It was the first time, Jeremy said much later, that he understood how much harm can be done by a certainty. His mother's death in 1691, a year before the panic, had left the house emptier, and his father's in 1699 emptied it further. By then Jeremy was seventeen and had been sent to a merchant in Boston to learn the cloth trade. Andover in those years was a farming town, but the cloth business was growing all over the colony, with fulling mills on the streams and imported broadcloth arriving at the wharves. Jeremy learned the difference between kersey and serge, how to judge a wool by the pull of a staple, how to keep the merchants' books and how to bargain with a shipmaster. He had an easy, confident manner, dark eyes and a good voice, and by the time he was twenty he was travelling the roads of the county as an agent, selling cloth to the country shopkeepers and buying up homespun for the coastal trade. In 1702 he married Joyce Peabody, a dressmaker from Deerfield, whom he had met when she came to Andover to sew a gown. It was a match between a talker and a listener, and it lasted. They set up house in Andover, in a square two-storey frame building with a shop front, and their two children came in quick succession. Obadiah Peabody Faulkner was born in 1705, and Deborah Peabody Faulkner in 1707. Jeremy adored them and was a fond, spoiling father, and in the evenings he would sit in the shop with the boy on one knee and the girl on the other and tell them stories, some of which had the Red Ledger in them and some of which did not. He was not at first a hunter. His father was dead, his brother Nathaniel carried the ledger's duties, and Jeremy left the matter to those better fitted for it, as he told himself. He was, however, a watcher by temperament. A merchant on the road hears things, and Jeremy heard, in the taverns of Ipswich and Haverhill and Newbury, a great many oddities. He noted them and, from time to time, passed them along to Nathaniel, who found them useful. In effect he was already working as the family's eyes, long before he thought of himself as a hunter. The calling came to him in 1716, when he was thirty-four. A neighbour, a man named for his good humour whom the whole street had buried the previous week, returned in the dark of a January night and stood in the road outside Jeremy's door, and would not come in. He would not cross the threshold. He stood there, in the frost, asking to be let in, in a voice that the household knew and could not believe. Jeremy went out, and what happened next he did not fully recount, but at dawn he came in with the neighbour's coat in his hand and a look on his face that Joyce recognised from the pages of the ledger. From that morning he was a slayer. His craft was Quarry Reading, the ability to look at a creature, or at the marks it left, and to see what it wanted, where it would go, and what it would do when it was cornered. He was, in the language of the ledger, a Spy, a hunter of information more than of blood, and he worked by watching, listening and intruding. He would take lodging in a town where something was wrong, sell cloth from door to door and hear what people said, then look at the roofs and doorsteps and the small disturbances of an ordinary street until a pattern emerged. His weapon was the long rifle, loaded with silver-cast shot, and he used it rarely and well, from a distance. The cloth trade was the perfect cover, and he moved along the coast from Newbury to Salem with samples in his saddlebag and a silver ball in the pan. His tally over fourteen years was some thirty vampires taken, an excellent number for a man who hunted in the intervals of business. The best remembered was a creature that had been feeding for a season on the fishing families of the Merrimack, which he identified by the fact that it never disturbed a house in which a certain kind of herb was drying, and which he trapped in a cooper's yard after a chase across the town. Among the Faulkners he became known as a man who read a scene the way a scholar reads a page. His brother-in-law and later collaborator Denys Cooke, the saddler at Marblehead, made his saddlebags. His daughter Deborah rode with him from her early teens. The rivalry with the Proctors bored him. He took the Red Ledger seriously and thought its tally a point of family honour, but he considered the Proctors as tradesmen consider a rival firm, with a mixture of respect and irritation, and he was known to say that the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461 and whom neither ledger would ever name, was long gone and that they should be attending to what walked in Massachusetts. He died in 1730 in the course of a chase, at forty-eight, when the creature he was following led him over the roofs of a row of warehouses on a wet night and a beam gave way beneath him. He fell, and did not rise. Joyce entered the last line in the ledger herself. His son Obadiah, who was never a hunter, kept the cloth business open, and his daughter Deborah, who followed him into the calling, carried his rifle until her own death in 1733. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and the Slayerverse records remember him as a Faulkner who read the dark the way other men read a ledger of accounts.