Deerfield, Massachusetts, where Joyce Peabody was born in 1681, was the farthest edge of the English settlements up the Connecticut River, a single street of timber houses behind a stockade, with meadows on the flats and the forest coming down to the back fences. It had been founded a mere decade before her birth and had already been burned once, in the terrible autumn of 1675 when a wagon train of grain was ambushed at Bloody Brook and the town was abandoned for a time. The people who returned to it were hard, pious and watchful. They kept muskets by the door and the meeting-house bell ready, and they taught their children to count the hours until dark. Joyce grew up in that alertness and it never quite left her.
Her family were farmers and, on her mother's side, needle-women, for in a frontier town where a bolt of cloth cost a month's labour every stitch was precious. Girls were set to the needle early, to hem and darn and turn old coats into new, and Joyce showed an aptitude from the first. By twelve she could set a sleeve so that it hung true, and by sixteen she was being paid in eggs, wool and small coin by neighbours who wanted a good Sunday gown from very little material. The fashion in Massachusetts lagged some years behind London's, but women still wanted the open gown, the stomacher, the petticoat that showed beneath the skirt, and she worked out how to make them from what came up the river on the trader's sledge. She had a keen eye and a flat, quiet voice, and a way of standing with the pins in her mouth that customers found soothing.
She left Deerfield in her early twenties, to the regret of her family, and went down the valley and over the hills toward the coast, apprenticing herself in the port towns to a tailor's widow who taught her the finer points of the trade. It was in Andover, on a visit to make a gown for a farmer's wife, that she met Jeremy Faulkner. He was the son of the late Josiah Faulkner's household, a young man of nineteen or twenty who was then learning the cloth trade and who came into the sewing room to price a length of broadcloth. He was talkative and she was not, and by the end of the afternoon he had told her a good deal about himself and she had told him her price. They were married in 1702, when she was twenty-one and he was twenty, in the Andover meeting-house, with a wedding feast of boiled salt beef, cider and a spiced loaf, and the bride wore a gown that she had cut and sewn herself.
The Faulkner family into which she had married was odd in ways that took time to reveal. There was a ledger, red-covered and much handled, kept in a chest with a lock, and the men of the house would take it out on certain evenings and read from it, quietly, in the voice reserved for scripture. They were descended, she gathered, from the Faulkners of Lancashire who had fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and there was an old grudge with a family in Yorkshire, the Proctors, who kept a white ledger of their own. It sounded like the sort of clan feud that other families had over a boundary or a will. Joyce, who was practical, took it as such for a good while. She did not ask about the nights when Jeremy's father was out, since he had died three years before, and she assumed that such things belonged to the past.
She learned otherwise gradually. Jeremy, who was a cloth merchant and made a good living from wool and linen bought at country markets and sold in Boston, did not at first take up the hunt. His brother Nathaniel did, and the household understood that Nathaniel was a slayer, one who left on horseback and came back scratched. It was not until 1716, when Joyce's husband was thirty-four, that the calling came to him too, and by then she had been prepared. A neighbour who was buried on the hill had come back and would not come inside. Jeremy stood in the yard and talked to him through the night. In the morning Joyce found him at the table with grey in his face and the ledger open in front of him, and she made him tea and a cold breakfast and said nothing, because there was nothing to be said.
Her part in what followed was that of the seamstress who keeps the hunter mended. She let out coats to hide holsters. She sewed pockets into the linings of cloaks for silver shot, a long strip of pouches in a girdle for stakes, and a wide skirt with a slit in the seam so that a woman might reach a pistol without appearing to move. For Jeremy she made a plain dark riding-coat, broad in the back, with a hidden compartment for the ledger. She patched wounds too, with her sewing-needle and a thread boiled in cider, since she had steadier fingers than any surgeon within ten miles. She was careful about the blood. She washed and burned what could not be washed, and she never told the neighbours what she knew.
Her children were born close together. Obadiah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1705, was a thoughtful boy who took no interest in the hunt and later settled into farming and the militia's paperwork, and lived until 1767. Deborah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1707, was a different creature, a girl who could hit a target at thirty paces by the age of twelve and who, when the calling came, took to it as her father had. She became a slayer and died young, in 1733, three years after her father. Joyce, who outlived them both in the way that mothers of hunters often do, had sewn Deborah's first pair of hunting breeches and would sew her burial shift as well. She said afterward that she had spent her life making garments for people who would not wear them long.
The great blow of her middle years was Jeremy's death in 1730. He fell from a roof during a chase, on a cold night in Andover, when he was forty-eight, and the fall broke his neck. Joyce was forty-nine, with two grown children and the shop, and she carried on. She moved into a smaller house, took in sewing from the merchants' wives and taught two nieces the trade, and she attended meeting each Sunday in a black gown of her own making. She kept the red-ledger entry for her husband in her own hand, in a careful script, adding the date of the fall and the words, He was the proud rook and he fell from the height. It stands in the ledger still.
She died in 1737, at fifty-six, in childbed, a death that astonished her neighbours since she had been thought long past that danger. The women who attended her said afterward that she had asked only for her needle case, which they put in her hands. The Slayerverse family histories mention her as the seamstress of the Faulkner hunters, the woman who never carried a pistol but whose stitching held the Red Ledger's Massachusetts branch in its coats.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
