Lucy Osgood Faulkner

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

Lucy Osgood Faulkner was born in 1768 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and spent her working life as a schoolteacher in a town that valued its cod, its cannon and its casks of rum a good deal more than it valued its children's letters. She was a Faulkner through her family's custom of passing the name down the female line, and though she was not a hunter herself, she belonged to the Red Ledger household in every way that mattered. She never married and had no children of her own. She died in 1813 at the age of forty-five, in an outbreak of plague that the town physician could not name, and several hundred people attended a funeral that the parish record called the largest it had seen for a woman who was neither rich nor wellborn. Her father, Hezekiah Osgood, was born in 1743 and died in 1795. He was a militiaman, a member of the Marblehead regiment that marched out of the harbour town in 1775 and was later remembered for rowing the Continental Army across the Delaware on a freezing December night. Hezekiah did not make that crossing, having been left behind to guard the coast, but he told the story as if he had pulled an oar. Her mother, Rachel Cole, born in 1745 and living until 1819, was a seamstress who took in piecework from the town's sail lofts, and whose fingers were so scarred with needle pricks that her daughters used to joke that she could sew in the dark. Neither parent was a vampire slayer, though the Coles were a cousin branch of the Faulkners and the household was used to the odd hunter coming to supper. Lucy had one sister, Rachel Osgood Faulkner, born in 1765, who later married a wheelwright and became the mother of a hunter. The two girls grew up in a narrow house near the harbour, sharing a bed, a slate and a shelf of four books: a Bible, a speller, a worn copy of Pilgrim's Progress and an almanac. Lucy memorised the whole speller before she was ten, and by twelve she was correcting the minister's grammar under her breath. The war that defined her childhood was a war of shortages. Fishing stopped when the British ships stood off the coast, and the town's young men went into the Continental service or into privateers, and the school, which was kept by an old widow, closed for months at a time. It was Lucy who, at eleven, took the younger children of her street into the Osgood kitchen and taught them their letters on a bread board with a piece of chalk. She was sent, when she was fifteen, to a dame school in Salem to learn what a teacher needed. She proved so quick that within two years the schoolmistress asked her to stay as an assistant, and when she returned to Marblehead in 1786 she opened her own small school in the front room of a rented house. The town paid her a little from the rates, parents paid her a little more in coin and in kind, and she taught thirty children at a time to read, to write a fair hand, to cipher and to sew a sampler. She insisted that the girls learn arithmetic as well as stitching, which was unusual then, and she read them history out of the new American textbooks, not only the old British ones. Her pupils remembered her as tall, exact and dry, with a habit of tapping the desk with a ruler to mark a pause and a way of looking at a blot of ink as if it had insulted her personally. Lucy's connection to the Faulkner work was practical. The Red Ledger is an account book, and in the decades after the Revolution the family needed someone who could keep accounts in a good hand, draw up a legible tally and copy entries from worn pages before the damp took them. Lucy was that person. Her cousin Betsey Whittier Faulkner, the vampire slayer called The Silent Tally, was her first patron in the matter, and it was Betsey who brought her the ledger to copy one winter in the 1790s. Lucy copied it by candlelight over nine weeks, wrote a fair index of the names and dates, and, when asked if she had read what she copied, said only that she had read it accurately. She was not a hunter, never wanted to be one, and was not above telling a hunter who came to her school door that he was dripping on her floor. The family respected her for that. She also taught the children of the hunters. More than one young Faulkner and Whittier learned to read and to reckon at her kitchen-table school, and more than one learned from her, without a word being spoken about it, that an education was a weapon of its own. When the Faulkner boys and girls of the next generation went out into the ports and the new western lands with their ledgers, the ones who could write a clear report of a night's work had, more often than not, sat under Lucy's ruler. She did not marry. A widowed captain courted her for a season in 1801, bringing her a length of Indian cotton and an invitation to tea at his brother's, and she thanked him and sent back the cotton with a note in her clearest hand. Her life was her school, her small rented house on Orne Street, her sister's children and a flower bed that she tended with the same exactness she brought to sums. Her chief vanity was her handwriting, which was a copperplate so clean that a few of her pupils' copybooks survive in the Marblehead historical collection and are still admired. The plague that killed her came in the late summer of 1813, in the middle of the second war with Britain, when the harbour was closed and crowded with prizes and sick sailors. A fever that the physicians called the plague moved through the wharf streets, and Lucy, who had kept her school open in the face of it, took ill in October. She died in 1813, aged forty-five, in the back room of her sister's house, and her pupils, a hundred or more of them grown and half-grown, carried her to the burying ground. Her last request, found in a note, was that her ruler be buried with her, and her sister declined, saying that the ruler was still needed. Lucy Osgood Faulkner is remembered as the teacher of Marblehead and as the copyist who preserved a generation of Red Ledger entries that would otherwise have perished. The Faulkner family regards her ledger index as one of the foundations of its archive, and its hand is recognisable in the later Kentucky and New Orleans copies. In the Slayerverse she is honoured as the kind of person whose patience, schooling and handwriting made the long contest with the Proctors of the White Ledger something that could be remembered and compared, a record in a clear hand rather than a rumour.