Nathaniel Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Wide Bridle. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

A surveyor measures land by walking it, and Nathaniel Faulkner walked more of eastern Massachusetts than almost anyone of his day. Born in 1668 at Andover, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he became a vampire slayer of the House of Faulkner at sixteen and a licensed surveyor of town bounds not long after, and for thirty years the two trades fed each other. The chain and compass took him into every wood lot, cart track and boundary swamp between the Merrimack and the coast; the hawthorn stakes in his saddlebag took care of what he met there after dark. The ledger calls him The Wide Bridle, for the breadth of country he rode, and he died in 1716, aged forty-eight, beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt. He was born into a household that already had a long memory. His father, Josiah Faulkner, whom the family called The Andover Hound, was a slayer in the Lancastrian line, the son of an Anne Faulkner who had kept the Red Ledger in Lancashire, and he was remembered as the man who carried the Red Ledger into Massachusetts sewn into the lining of his coat. Nathaniel's mother, Phoebe Ingersoll, was a weaver of a New England family, and the loom in the front room of their farmhouse never stood idle. She wove coverlets and linsey-woolsey cloth for the neighbours, and Nathaniel grew up to the clack of the beam and the smell of oiled wool. He was the eldest of four children, with a sister, Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678, and two brothers who shared a name: Jeremy Faulkner, born in 1682, who would become a slayer himself, and Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, born in 1685, who did not. The family used the middle name Ingersoll to keep the two boys distinct, and the habit gave the younger Jeremy a lifelong, faintly ironic dignity. Andover in the 1670s was a farming town of scattered houses and stony fields on the Shawsheen and Merrimack, its meeting-house standing at the centre like a fortress. Life ran to the rhythm of the Puritan Sabbath: two long sermons, a cold noon meal, no work and very little laughter. The colony paid its ministers in corn and cordwood, fined men for sleeping in meeting, and expected every household to teach its children to read the Bible. Nathaniel learned his letters at his mother's knee and his arithmetic at the town's dame school, and he showed an unusual gift for geometry. A neighbour who was a surveyor took him on as a chain-carrier at fourteen, and the boy discovered that he loved the slow exactness of fixing a boundary, sighting along a compass needle and driving a marker into ground that would hold it for a century. His calling came in 1684, when he was sixteen, on a lonely road on the way back from a survey in the north of the county. A coach passed him at dusk, an odd, high-wheeled vehicle that had no business on a colonial track, and the driver, hatted and silent, looked straight ahead. There were no passengers. The horses were lathered and the curtains were drawn, and when Nathaniel, curious, stepped into the road to see, the coach did not slow. He found afterward that the horses had been hired at an inn a day's ride east by a stranger who had paid in gold and whose driver, when the inn's ostler laid a hand on his sleeve, had been colder than the night. It took him a week to tell his father. Josiah, listening, put down his pipe and said only that he had wondered when it would come. Josiah Faulkner became his mentor, and the training was the harder for being carried out between the ploughing and the harvest. Nathaniel learned what the slayers of his house called Hawthorn Craft, the working knowledge of the wood: which hawthorn stands had grown in the right soil, when to cut it, how to season and point it, how to test a stake on a hanging weight before trusting one's life to it. He carried a flintlock pistol for emergencies, loaded with a ball he never expected to use, and the hawthorn stakes rode in a canvas quiver he sewed himself. His first hunt, at seventeen, was a hunt of the ordinary sort: a night beside a barn where a wandering vampire had killed two cows, and a clean stroke at dawn. Josiah entered it in the ledger under Nathaniel's initials, and Phoebe made him a shirt. The summer of 1692 fell on him like a blow. The witchcraft panic that gripped the colony spread from Salem into Andover that August, and within weeks dozens of the town's people, many of them neighbours, were accused, jailed and pressed to confess. Nathaniel was twenty-four. As a slayer he knew precisely what was real, and he watched the magistrates convict old women and children for things that had nothing to do with the night. It was a private agony. The ledger contains an unusual entry in his hand, dated September, that reads only: "Nothing taken this month. The town is doing worse than any of us." He did what he could, carrying food to the jail and vouching for accused neighbours as an honest measurer of land, but he could not stop it. His mother, Phoebe Ingersoll, had died the previous year, in 1691, and he was glad she had not lived to see it. As a surveyor he prospered. He ran the lines for the town of Andover and for several of its neighbours, laid out the highways, and gave evidence in the boundary disputes that plagued the colony, and the work made him a person of consequence. He was a tall, spare man, weather-browned, with a habit of squinting at the horizon, and he lived alone. He never married and had no children; he explained once to his brother Jeremy that a man who spent his nights in barns and churchyards had no business asking a woman to wait up for him. After his father's death in 1699, he became the acknowledged head of the Massachusetts slayers of his line, and Jeremy hunted at his side for the rest of his life. Hannah married out of the ledger, into a farming family, and took the household's stories with her. The Faulkner and Proctor rivalry had reached New England long before Nathaniel, in the form of a small Proctor branch settled to the south, and he treated it with the same precision he brought to boundaries. Each family, he said, should keep to its own side of the line and pay its debts. He exchanged cool, correct letters with a Proctor cousin and once conceded, in writing, a disputed tally. It was the sort of gesture that made him respected across the divide. He died in 1716 on a night hunt in a hill farm's timber barn, where a vampire was sheltering in the hay. The old beams, rotten under a burden of winter snow, gave way as Nathaniel struck, and the whole roof came down on him. The vampire was taken in the same collapse; Jeremy, standing outside, finished the work at dawn. Nathaniel Faulkner was forty-eight. The Slayerverse remembers him as the slayer who drew the map of the colony's dark places, and his surveys, deposited in the town record, are still consulted today for the lines he laid.