Lucy Hale Faulkner

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

Lucy Hale Faulkner was born in 1738 at Springfield, Massachusetts, and lived twenty-five years, of which only the last one was spent as a vampire slayer. Called in 1762, when a night watch turned up the same corpse three mornings running, she took the alias The Dry Quill and the craft of Night Trapping, and in 1763 she died beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt. The Faulkner Red Ledger records her as a farmer's wife, though it names no husband, and her short career is remembered for its intensity more than its length. Springfield in the year of her birth was a river town of some fifty households, a place of ferries, wharves and an armoury that would grow in importance in later decades. The Connecticut ran wide and brown at the foot of the town, and the road to Boston ran east through pine barrens. Trade was in grain, timber and salt pork. The Faulkners there kept a farm on the flat land north of the town, a place of barns, cider mills and a big kitchen where the stove was always warm. Her father, Gideon Mather Faulkner, born in 1713, farmed it, a plain and stubborn man who worked from dark to dark and whose chief interest outside the fields was the weather. Her mother, Patience Hale, born in 1707, was a milliner who made bonnets, caps and trimmings for the town's women in a front room with a sash window. Patience died in 1749, when Lucy was eleven, leaving her a small brother, Reuben Faulkner, born in 1739, and a house that ran on habit and porridge. The girl grew up quickly. She kept house for her father and Reuben from her early teens, plucked fowl, salted pork and boiled soap, and learned from her mother's stock of ribbons the small vanity of a well-made cap. Educated only at a dame school, she was nonetheless known for her handwriting, a fine and regular script that earned her the quill in her alias. She wrote letters for neighbours who could not, kept her father's accounts and copied out the family records in a fair hand. It was through those copies, by her own account, that she first understood what the Faulkners were. The Red Ledger came out at the New Year, and she was allowed to hold the pen, and what she copied did not read like a farm book. For years she treated it as a story about her ancestors. That changed in 1762, during the second spring of a run of bad luck in the district. A watch had been set on the burying ground outside town after a series of thefts from graves, and the watchmen, three farmers with lanterns, reported that they had found the same corpse lying on the grass three mornings running, each time out of its coffin and each time reburied by the sexton. On the third morning Lucy walked out to the burying ground herself, examined the disturbed earth and the marks along the wall, and told her father what she had understood. He said nothing for a long time and then went to the chest and took out the long rifle. Her craft, Night Trapping, began there. The corpse had come back three times because it had a route and a habit, and Lucy reasoned that anything with a habit could be caught by preparing its route. She dug shallow pits in the paths from the burying ground, set tripwires of horsehair, hung bells in the hedgerows and planted lanterns, unlit, at intervals along the wall, so that a watcher in a loft could light one after another. She loaded a long rifle with silver-cast shot. The trap worked on the fourth night and the fifth. The family record credits her with four kills in her first season, which was an extraordinary rate for a novice, and adds a remark, in another hand, that she seemed to enjoy the mathematics of it more than the shooting. She was a small, brisk woman, quick to laugh and quicker to argue, who kept a dry humour about the whole business. The Dry Quill was in fact a joke, made at a family gathering when someone asked how she could bear to write down such things so calmly. Her manner among the militia hunters of the town was one of cheerful impatience. She had no mentor, and she did not have the training that her cousins in the older Faulkner houses had received, and she made up for it with ingenuity. The wars with France were then in their last year, and Springfield was full of recruits, deserters and returning soldiers, which gave her quarry cover and her a great deal of work. The ledger styles her a farmer's wife, and the family tradition is uncertain what to make of this. It names no husband, and her brother Reuben, when asked by a later Faulkner, said only that she kept the house and the farm as any wife would, and that the title was a courtesy the town gave to any woman who managed a holding. Whatever the truth, she had no children, and no spouse is recorded, and she was known in Springfield mostly by her handwriting and her brisk step on the road to the burying ground. In 1763 she went out at dusk to a barn on the edge of the farm, an old timber structure she had marked as the resting place of a creature she had been tracking for weeks. She had rigged it with her usual devices, and she went in ahead of Reuben, who followed with a lantern. The vampire was there, and the fight was short. In the struggle a main beam, weakened by years of rot and by the traps she had strung from it, came down and took part of the roof with it. Reuben pulled her out from the wreckage but she died before dawn, at twenty-five. She had killed the creature. The tally in the Red Ledger for that night reads only that the account was settled, and that the barn was a loss. Her father lived on until 1785, and he kept her quill on the mantel. Her brother maintained the ledger's copy in her hand for years. Among the Faulkner cadet branches, Lucy is regarded as the pattern of the inventive hunter, and her methods, pits, tripwires and bells, were taught in later generations to slayers who never knew where they came from. In the Slayerverse she stands as a reminder that the craft asked much and sometimes gave little time, and that a single bright year of it could still be worth a lasting place in the record.