Maurice Hutchinson

Soldier slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Sable Scythe. Craft: Night Trapping.

Maurice Hutchinson wrote the finest hand in the Merrimack valley and killed vampires by night, and he never seemed to think the two occupations sat oddly together. He was born in 1641 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, a frontier township of scattered farms and a single street that had been planted only the year before. His parentage is not recorded in any ledger, and the Faulkner family papers say only that he was a boy of the town who came to the notice of the meeting-house early for his quickness with figures and letters. He was raised in rough Puritan poverty, among stumps and cornfields and the constant labour of clearing, and he learned to read from a psalter that he later said he had studied to pieces. The place made him early. Haverhill in the 1640s and 1650s was a settlement of perhaps a hundred families on the north bank of the river, sharing a common field and a burial ground, and ruled by the minister, the selectmen and the price of Indian corn. Money was tight and much trade was done in kind, in pork, wheat and beaver skins, and wampum still passed between the English and the Pentucket people, so that a boy with a head for tallying was of use to nearly everyone. He worked as a boy at the ferry and the mill, ran errands for the selectmen and copied deeds for a neighbour whose eyes had failed. By his teens he was writing town business in a clear, upright, unadorned hand, and it was that hand which brought him his employment as a clerk and recorder of the township. His calling came in 1657, when he was sixteen, in a boarding house. He was lodging for the winter in a house at the ferry landing, kept by a widow who took in travelling coopers and surveyors, and one night a lodger who had arrived after dark settled his reckoning with a handful of coins. Maurice, who had a clerk's eye for money, turned one over in the candlelight and saw that it bore the head of a king he could not place and a date so far back that the silver was worn nearly smooth. The house itself had been built only a dozen years before. Every other coin in the handful was the same. He understood, with a cold shiver that ran from his neck to his hands, that the man had been paying his way in a currency older than the roof over them, and that he did not eat the widow's porridge and did not appear to breathe. He said nothing then, but he followed the lodger out the next night and watched where he went, and he did not sleep much for a week. Nobody trained him. There was no mentor, and the Faulkner ledgers state that plainly. He was a Soldier by temper, one of those slayers who prefer method and discipline to inspiration, and what he lacked in teaching he made up in preparation. He learned what he could from the few books in the town, the Bible, an old almanac and a treatise on the militia, and drew up his own rules in a notebook. He carried a flintlock pistol, a costly weapon for a young clerk, bought by selling a year's earnings in advance, and a bundle of hawthorn stakes cut from the thorn tree at the edge of the common. His craft, which he discovered gradually, was Night Trapping, a knack for laying out a place so that a vampire walked into a position it could not leave, with doors that would not open from the inside, lanes that ran to dead ends, and lamps and mirrors placed to dazzle and confuse. It was a clerk's kind of craft, all planning and no flourish. The Red Ledger's Massachusetts pages call him The Sable Scythe. The name came from his habit of working in black coat and hat, moving through a town at night like a shadow, and from the long, clean way he cleared a nest, one after another, until nothing remained. He was not a big man, but he was patient, and he was possessed of a dry, level stillness that other hunters found hard to read. He kept his own tally in a bound book with his accounts, entering the vampires as if they were overdue debts, and it ran to more than forty by the time he was fifty. He avoided the sort of vainglory that pervaded the Lancashire ledgers, and he never took part in the Faulkner and Proctor rivalry beyond a mild curiosity as to whether the Guest had crossed the ocean. He did not think so. He said that if the thing had fled to the New World it would have been found long since by a colony that counted every strange footprint. He married Mercy Faulkner in 1663. She was a yeoman's daughter and a teacher, a tall, prim young woman whom he had met over a disputed deed, and he told a friend afterwards that he had married the only person in Haverhill who could out-read him. She learned of his hunting soon after the wedding and, to his relief, met it with practical questions rather than horror. They built a partnership on paper. He wrote the town's record by day and hunted by night, and she kept the school and the house and a small chalk-marked calendar on the door of the kitchen cupboard, recording when he was due back. Their daughter Martha Faulkner was born in 1666, and their daughter Clemence Faulkner in 1669, and both girls took their mother's family name, according to the Faulkner custom of following the line that carried the tally. He gave Martha a small stake, a proper one, when she was ten, and taught her to lay a trap. Clemence he taught to write, and she wrote for both of them. King Philip's War broke in 1675 and the Merrimack valley was one of the places that felt it hardest, with farms burned, families fleeing to garrison houses, and the militia summoned from every field. Maurice served with the Haverhill company as a clerk and sometimes as a scout, and the war gave his night work a perfect cover, since nobody looked twice at a man who went out armed after dark. In those years he took three vampires in a single winter, drawn to the sick and the dying in the garrison houses. He was in Haverhill again in 1692 when the witchcraft panic reached the town, and he did what he could to keep the fear off his household, quietly moving the wrong names off the constables' lists and, where he could not, testifying with a clerk's dry accuracy that the accused had been at the meeting-house at the hour named. It cost him some friends and he never spoke of it. Mercy died in 1693, after a long wasting illness, and he did not entirely recover from the loss. He lived on for fifteen years in the house by the river, with Clemence at his side, and while he went out less often his eyes stayed sharp. He wrote the last entries in the town book in a hand that was, at sixty, still as clear as at twenty. He died in 1708, aged sixty-seven, in a fall from his horse on the Bradford road, when the animal put a foot in a frozen rut on the way home from a court day. He was buried beside Mercy. Martha carried the tally forward until her own death in 1725, and the family kept his notebook of traps for generations, ordinary paper pages in a small upright hand. In the Slayerverse he stands as one of the plainest, most methodical and least celebrated of the Massachusetts hunters, a vampire slayer who took his craft as seriously as he took his clerkship and left both in perfect order.