Kit Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

On a certain reach of the river Ribble the water runs wide, brown and slow between mudflats, and for most of the seventeenth century the quickest way across it at Preston was in a flat-bottomed boat poled by a man who knew where the bottom was firm. Kit Faulkner was that man for the best part of fifty years. Born in 1647 in Preston, Lancashire, he was the elder son of Robert Slater, a clerk, and Gunnora Faulkner, a housekeeper, and he bore his mother's family name, as Faulkner custom allowed when a line ran through a daughter. He was not a slayer and never had the calling. What he had instead was a boat, a pair of strong arms and an unrivalled memory for who crossed the water and when. Preston in his boyhood was a market town of guilds and gentlemen, its streets thick with dye-works, tanneries and the grand houses of Royalist families who had lost their fortunes in the civil wars. Kit's father worked as a clerk to a local attorney, copying deeds and rent rolls in a small room with a window on the Fishergate, and brought home a steady if modest wage. Gunnora kept house for the household and for an aunt, and her cooking was the sort the neighbourhood recalled: oatcake, hotpot on a Saturday, a great deal of tripe and onions. A brother, Nicholas Slater, was born two years after Kit, in 1649, and the boys shared a bed under the eaves and a rivalry so gentle that neither recognised it. Nicholas took after his father, cautious and precise. Kit took after the river. He went to the water at fourteen, apprenticed to an old ferryman whose boat lay below the bridge at the town's edge. He learned the tides first, the way the sea pushed up the estuary at spring and slackened at neap, and the sudden, treacherous shifts of the channel after a flood. He learned how to load a boat so that a cow would not panic, and how to talk a frightened woman into sitting down. Above all he learned to look at a passenger. A ferryman sees everyone; the same faces make the same crossings, and one that suddenly stops appearing, or arrives at an odd hour, or refuses to look at the water, is noticed. Kit had the kind of steady attention that people mistake for placidity, and by twenty he had taken over the old man's boat. The great plague year, 1665 and 1666, was the first great trial of his young manhood. Lancashire was spared the worst that London suffered, but the fear travelled faster than the sickness, and the towns shut their gates to strangers. Kit was ordered to carry no one from certain districts, and he took the orders very seriously; he refused, on one occasion, to take a drover across the river because of the colour of his face, and was proved right a week later. That decision earned him respect in the town and a quiet visit from a man who introduced himself as a cousin on his mother's side. The cousin asked whether Kit had ever taken across a passenger who wanted to go only at night, who would not touch running water, or who paid in coins so old they had to be rubbed clean. Kit said that he had, and the cousin nodded and told him about the Red Ledger. That was how he became one of the Faulkner family's watchers. It was a role that appears in the ledger's margins as a series of small, careful notes in the hands of others: a boatman at Preston, who reports. Kit never carried a stake, and the family did not ask him to. What he did was carry word. He noted the crossing of any stranger who seemed wrong, he knew which of the inns along the Ribble had cellars that were kept oddly locked, and when a slayer needed to go over the river unseen, he took them in the dark, with muffled oars and no lantern. Tides do not lie, and a vampire who crossed Kit's water always left a trace on the mud that he could read the next morning. Several entries in the Red Ledger in the last decades of the century begin with a line that is some version of the same sentence: the ferryman says. He never married and had no children. The family said afterward that he was married to the boat, and Kit himself did not deny it, though he lodged for many years with a widow near the quayside and was fond of her children. His brother Nicholas, the saddler, came to visit on holy days, and the two men would sit on a bench by the water and argue about horses and weather. Their mother Gunnora died in 1675, when Kit was twenty-eight; their father Robert lived until 1690, long enough to see the Glorious Revolution of 1688 pass through the country like a change of wind. Kit, who thought of kings as a kind of weather, was not much interested. What mattered to a ferryman was whether the bridge would be repaired and whether the toll would rise. His dealings with the Proctors of Yorkshire were indirect. He knew of them the way one knows the far bank of a river: a presence, a competitor, a source of stories. Passengers carrying letters and goods between Lancashire and Yorkshire sometimes mentioned a clerk at York who kept a rival ledger, and Kit would pass the information on to his kin with a shrug. He was a Faulkner in the grain of his loyalties and thought the Guest, who escaped at Towton in 1461, had been let go by Yorkist carelessness. He held the opinion with no great heat, and it never went further than a remark over his pipe. Old age came to him slowly. Into his sixties and seventies he still worked the boat, though younger men did most of the poling, and he sat in the stern giving advice on currents. He died in 1723 of old age, aged 76, in his bed near the quay, a very long life for a man who worked on cold water. The town remembered him as the ferryman who never lost a passenger. The Faulkner ledger remembers him as something else: the man who watched the river for a hundred hunters and was never thanked. In the modern Slayerverse the family still keeps a small toast for the watchers at the water's edge, and the first name on the list is Kit's.