Martha Hutchinson

Spy slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Fallow Beacon. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

Martha Hutchinson was born in 1867 in New Orleans, in the Garden District, and lived sixty-three years as a nurse and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the wards, warehouses and river districts of the city. The family book knows her as The Fallow Beacon, a name taken from a field left to lie and a lamp left burning in a window, and it classes her as a Spy, which in the Faulkner sense means a hunter who learns before she acts, who gets close, listens and is believed to be something else. Her craft was Dusk Patrol, the regular circuit walked at the hour when the light fails, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was called in 1885, in a sickroom, when a fever broke and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed. In 1887 she married the machinist Hippolyte Foster Faulkner, and they raised one son, Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner, who was not called. She died in 1930 of old age, aged sixty-three, a few weeks after her husband. She was born in a tall white house on Jackson Avenue, with a cast-iron gallery and a live oak in the yard, into the Hutchinsons, an old Massachusetts family that had sent a branch to the Gulf before the war and had done well out of it in the ordinary, unspectacular American way. The Ledger's papers do not name her parents, and she was not one to supply them. She said that they were respectable people, who held a pew at the Methodist church on Prytania Street, and that they had brought her up to be useful, which was a large word in that house. She was a small, brisk, yellow-haired child, quick to laugh and quicker to notice, and she could, at five, tell by the footsteps on the stair which of her father's friends had been drinking. She had, her mother said, an unfortunate gift for being in the room. She wished from a very early age to be a nurse. She had been ill at seven, in a fever summer, and had lain for three weeks under the eye of a large, patient, red-handed woman from the Irish Channel, who sat beside her through every night, and who had, when the fever turned, put a cold cloth on her forehead and said that she would do. The child took this as a commission. At sixteen she announced to the household that she intended to train at the Charity Hospital, and was told by her father that a Garden District girl did not nurse. She said that she would be the first. She trained in the autumn of 1884, at seventeen, on a ward of the old hospital on Common Street, where she was taught to make a bed, to roll a bandage, to read a pulse and to take a man's last words without seeming to listen, which was the skill that would make her name. She was called the next year, in the spring of 1885, in a sickroom. The patient was a man of forty, a clerk from the river front, who had lain for ten days in a back ward with a fever that the doctors called malarial and that nobody could break. Martha had the night shift. On the tenth night, at about three in the morning, she sat beside the bed with her hand on his wrist, and his fever broke, all at once, as a fever does, with a sweat and a long breath. He opened his eyes. He looked at her with a perfectly clear, calm, reasonable gaze. Then he said, with great courtesy, that he wondered if she would be so kind as to close the shutters, because the dawn hurt him. She got up and closed them. She stood for a moment with her hand on the latch. She had seen a good many men come out of a fever, and none of them had asked for the dark. She did not scream, and she did not run. She did what a nurse does, which is to go on being a nurse. She took his pulse, and counted it, and found that it was the slowest she had ever taken. She noted that his hands were cold. She noted the two small marks at the side of his neck, which she had taken for the sores of the fever, and which, she now saw, had not been sores. She washed his face and arranged the sheet, and went out into the corridor, and sat for a full quarter of an hour on the stairs, doing a sum. Then she went back and sat with him till six, and did not leave the room. In the morning she was told that he had been removed, in the night, by two men in a cab, who said that they were his brothers. She found, by noon, from the ward sister, who had seen a great deal and said very little, the address of a woman on Dumaine Street who kept a shelf of herbs and a book. It was Sarah Foster, the herbalist, who sent her to her daughter, and Sarah Faulkner, who was a slayer and was twenty-two, who took her out that evening on the first of a good many patrols. It was the habit of the Faulkners to teach a new hunter by letting her walk. Sarah walked her through the lower Quarter at dusk, stopped her at the corner of Dumaine and Decatur, and told her to say what she saw. Martha, who had been looking at sickrooms for a year, said that the man at the end of the block had the colour of a man who had not been fed. She was right. It was her first kill, and it was clean. The Dusk Patrol was the craft for her. It is the oldest of the Faulkner crafts, a nightly circuit walked at the hour when the light goes out of the sky, by the same route, until whatever watches the walker shows itself, and she took to it as a nurse takes to a round. She had a ward's habit of regularity, a nurse's habit of going in on the dot, and a nurse's gift of being invisible. She was, in every sense, a Spy. She learned by going into the houses of the sick, in the daytime, with her bag, and by sitting with the dying and listening. She knew, before any constable or priest, which houses in the Quarter had a door that never opened and which warehouses on the river had a night watchman who did not come in the morning. She was never challenged. A nurse with a bag is a thing that no one suspects of anything, and she carried, in the same bag, her pistol and a leather roll of silver-tipped stakes. They were made for her, in 1885, by a machinist who did not ask what they were for. She met him in the autumn, at the hospital, where he had come with a parcel of his mother's herbs, and a fortnight later she took a broken stake to his shop on Tchoupitoulas Street. He was a tall, stooped, courteous young man named Hippolyte Foster Faulkner, the brother of the hunter Sarah and son of the river pilot Augustus, and he made three stakes for her in a week. She said that she had not been so exactly understood by any man in her life. They were married in 1887, in the church of the Treme, and they went to Baton Rouge the next year, where their son Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner was born in the spring of 1888, and where she nursed in the charity ward and walked the river at dusk. They came back to New Orleans in 1899, when the railway shops offered her husband a place and the Charity Hospital offered her a post, and they took a double cottage in the Irish Channel. She was, for thirty years, one of the most trusted senior nurses in that hospital. She took the night ward, and the night rounds, and she nursed, in the Storyville years, a great many sporting men, musicians, girls and sailors whose families did not know where they were, and from whom she learned, without asking, where the night trade of the city went. The Ledger's cousins came to the ward to talk to her, in the guise of visitors. She told them what she had heard, in a low voice, over a basin. She hunted until her sixtieth year. In the great flood of 1927 she worked in the refugee camps on the high ground above the city for nine weeks, nursing, and walking at dusk along the tents, and her son, who was a druggist, said that she came home with her feet in rags and her gun in her bag, and that she had not lost a patient. She was a small, brisk, upright woman in her last years, with hair that had faded from yellow to the colour of straw, and she went on walking her circuit through the Irish Channel at dusk, in a grey cape, with a lantern. Her husband died in the winter of 1930, of a stroke, at the bench in his shed, at sixty-three. She nursed him for four days. She sat by him at the last, and she closed the shutters herself, afterward, in the way that her calling taught her, and then sat in the kitchen without speaking for a long time. She did not, after that, get up for supper. She died a few weeks later, in her own bed, of no disease that the doctor could name, which the doctor called old age, at sixty-three. She was buried beside him in the Faulkner tomb in the cemetery of the Treme, and in the evening of the funeral, at the hour when the light fails, her son, who had never hunted, walked the circuit once round the Channel with her lantern, and then went home. Martha Hutchinson is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Fallow Beacon, the nurse of Charity Hospital who watched the sick, walked the dusk and closed the shutters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet hunters of the Red Ledger, the women who learned the enemy at the bedside, and who proved that the best spy in a city is the one that every door is open to, and that no one thinks to fear.