Martha Faulkner

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

Martha Faulkner was born in 1666 in Andover, Massachusetts, and she was twenty-six when the town she had been raised in turned on itself. It is difficult to write of her without writing of that year, for the witchcraft panic that gripped the colony in 1692 fell on Andover harder than on any other place but Salem, and it was in Andover, in a schoolroom, that she was called. She was to spend the next thirty-three years as a midwife and a vampire slayer, known to the Red Ledger's Massachusetts book by the alias The Ash Beacon. Andover in her childhood was a farming town on the Shawsheen and Merrimack rivers, a scatter of white-oak houses, orchards, cornfields and sawmills gathered about a meeting-house on the hill. The families were large and devout, the winters were fierce, and the daily fare was salt pork, Indian pudding, rye-and-maslin bread and cider. Almost everyone was kin to someone, and every quarrel was carried into the church. Martha's mother, Mercy Faulkner, born in 1641, kept a dame school in the front room of the family house, teaching the small children of the neighbourhood their horn-books and psalms, and the town records styled her a spinster teacher, a title that sat oddly on a woman with two daughters but that she carried with composure. Her father was Maurice Hutchinson, a clerk who worked for the town selectmen, writing deeds, wills and rate-lists in a clear round hand. He was also a vampire slayer, known to the Ledger as The Sable Scythe, and Martha did not learn this until she was called. The Faulkner custom of the surname passing through daughters, common to the house, meant that she bore her mother's name and not her father's, and it also meant that the Hutchinson connection could be kept quiet in a colony in which too much knowledge invited trouble. Maurice kept his tally in the Massachusetts book in the same round hand in which he wrote the town's deeds, and he slipped away from the clerk's desk at dusk more often than anyone remarked. His younger daughter, Clemence Faulkner, was born in 1669, three years after Martha, and grew up a quick, cheerful girl who was never called. Martha herself was a solid, sensible young woman with a sharp memory and no patience for cant. She learned midwifery from the woman who delivered her, a Mistress of the parish who worked for the price of a pound of butter, and she took to it early: the long waits in kitchens, the boiling water and clean linen, the hand at the belly and the practical, unshaken voice. By twenty she was attending births in her own right, walking out at night on the frozen roads, and she came to know the farms of Andover from the inside, their chambers and their fears. She worked beside her mother in the schoolroom by day and delivered babies by night, and neither trade left her much time for herself. In the summer of 1692 the accusations began. Andover's afflicted girls had been summoned to Salem in July to identify witches, and in the weeks that followed some three dozen people of the town were arrested, among them the elderly, the poor and a good many who confessed only under pressure. The town was frightened, angry and full of eyes. It was in this month, in her mother's schoolroom on a stifling afternoon, that a small girl of five, a neighbour's child, put up her hand in the middle of a lesson and said quite calmly that there was a man standing in the corner who had no shadow. Mercy looked and saw nothing. Martha, standing at the door with a basket, looked and saw him. She knew in an instant, with a cold conviction she could not account for, that it was real, and that she was the only person in the room who could deal with it. She dealt with it that night, with a pair of hawthorn stakes from the orchard fence and her father's old flintlock pistol, which she had taken from its hook without a word. She followed the thing to the edge of the burying-ground, and she drove the stake in with a mallet borrowed from the sexton's shed. It was her father, not the church, who found her sitting on a gravestone at dawn, and he was neither surprised nor angry. He sat down beside her and told her the whole of it: the White Ledger, the Red Ledger, the Guest that had got away at Towton, the calling that had come to him at twenty-two. He became her mentor that day. He trained her through the following autumn, in the barn behind the schoolhouse, with a straw dummy and a lantern. Her craft was Night Trapping, the setting of snares and lures in the places the dead were known to frequent. Her instrument was patience: she chose a place, baited it with a lit lamp or a bundle of warm linen, and sat in the dark for hours with her pistol cocked and her breath held. She carried a flintlock pistol loaded with a single ball for the hard case, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes in a canvas roll for the sure one. Where her father was a scythe, she was a beacon, and the alias of the Ash Beacon came from the ash-wood torch she kept lit at the edge of her traps, a light that drew the hungry out of the dark. The panic ended in the winter, as the governor stopped the trials and the accusations lost their weight, but it had cost Andover dearly. Martha lived through its aftermath with a plain distaste for the kind of certainty that hangs the wrong people. She did not believe in the girls, and she did believe in the corner of the schoolroom; the difference, she said, was a matter of evidence. Her mother Mercy died in 1693, in the spring following, of a cold caught in the meeting-house, and Martha took over the dame school for a year until the town could find another mistress. She never married and had no children of her own, though she delivered, by her own count in the ledger, over eight hundred of other women's. Through the next three decades she hunted the valley of the Merrimack in the intervals of her midwifery, in the small hours between a birth and a breakfast. Her tally in the Red Ledger's Massachusetts book was modest, and each entry was made in her father's round hand, taught to her at his desk. Maurice, The Sable Scythe, died in 1708 at the age of sixty-seven, and Martha, forty-two, wrote up his last entry herself. She continued alone, helped in the household by her sister Clemence, until failing health slowed her. A wasting illness took her in 1725, at the age of fifty-nine, and she was buried in the old burying-ground on the hill above the Shawsheen. In the Slayerverse Martha Faulkner is remembered as the midwife of Andover who was called in a schoolroom in the year of the trials, and the Ash Beacon's light, still spoken of in the Massachusetts branch, is the one that burned steady while a town lost its head.