Rachel Osgood Faulkner

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

The sea was so close to Rachel Osgood Faulkner's childhood that she never entirely lost the habit of listening for it. She was born in 1765 at Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the rocky peninsula where the fishing fleet of the Grand Banks came to harbour, and where houses were stacked up the hillside on winding lanes as narrow as a ship's passage, each one facing the water. It was a town that smelled of drying cod, tar and low tide. The men went out to the banks in schooners for months at a time and the women stayed behind, so that Marblehead had a name for being a place run largely by its wives, and a name for the widows it produced. Rachel's father was Hezekiah Osgood, born in 1743, who fished when he was young and then served as a militiaman, and her mother was Rachel Cole, born in 1745, a seamstress who took in sailcloth mending and fine work for the merchants' wives, and who taught her daughter to stitch a seam that would hold against a gale. The Revolution shaped Rachel's childhood more than most. Marblehead was a hotbed of the patriot cause and, when the war began, sent some of its best men into the army, among them the Marblehead regiment under Colonel Glover, whose fishermen rowed Washington's army across the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776. Hezekiah Osgood was one of the town's militiamen and was called out more than once, as the harbour was threatened by British ships and the town watched constantly for landing parties. Rachel, eleven years old at the time of the Delaware crossing, remembered the mustering of the men and the empty streets afterward, the women standing at the windows and the flat ominous quiet of a town that had sent away its fathers and did not know how many would return. She carried from that time a plain, unsentimental toughness and a dislike of waste. She grew up in a household of two daughters. Her younger sister was Lucy Osgood Faulkner, born in 1768, and the two of them were close, sharing the work of the loft, the lessons of the dame school and the long labour of helping their mother with sewing. The Osgood family had a link to the Faulkners through a marriage some generations back, and in the coastal towns of Essex County the old families were so intertwined that most people were cousins of some kind. Rachel and Lucy were Faulkners by the family's custom of passing the name through its women, and although their father worked as a fisherman and militiaman and not as a slayer, the two girls knew from an early age that the Faulkner name carried a book with it. The Red Ledger, that record of vampires taken by the Lancastrian side since the Wars of the Roses, was known to them as something their elders spoke of in lowered voices. The harbour towns had a use for such a book. Ships from far ports came in with more than fish, and a Marblehead seaman had a well-developed sense of what should not be brought ashore. In 1788, when she was twenty-three, Rachel married Silas Goodwin, a wheelwright, born in 1768, whose workshop stood on the lane near the town landing. It was a good match, although the young couple had little money. Wheelwrights were among the essential craftsmen of any town, making and mending cartwheels, barrow wheels, the wheels of carriages and the great wooden wheels that turned mill machinery, and Silas was a careful worker who chose his oak and ash himself and let the felloes season for years. He was a quiet man, a little younger than his wife and not much given to argument, and the household ran on her decisions. They left Marblehead soon after the wedding, and the family's accounts say that they moved inland to a farm, so that Rachel, whose occupation is recorded as a farmer's wife, ended her life a good way from the sea. It was a change she felt for many years, and the salt wind of Marblehead was in her talk to the end. Their first child, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, was born in 1791. The second, a son named Ezekiel Faulkner, arrived in 1792, a year later, and the two children grew up together on the farm, learning to hoe, milk and gather eggs. The household was a busy one, a mix of a wheelwright's shop and a small farm, and Rachel managed both, sold surplus eggs and butter at market, kept the accounts, made the clothes and organised the labour of the harvest. She was a stout, handsome, hard-working woman with grey eyes and a level voice, and neighbours found that a disagreement with her tended to be short. Her daughter, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, lived to be seventy-eight, dying in 1869, and grew up to be the family's practical anchor, a farm wife like her mother. Ezekiel, the boy, was different. Even as a child he asked about the old book, and when he was called, as a young man, to become a vampire slayer, it was his mother who understood before anyone else what had happened and what it would mean. He died in 1851. She never hunted herself, but she raised a hunter and did it well. Rachel had a clear idea of how a slayer's household should run: there should be a room for boots and a peg for a rifle, someone always awake when the man of the house was out, a place set at supper that no one apologised for keeping, and a habit of not asking questions that did not need asking. She taught Ezekiel to keep his mouth shut in the village and his eyes open on the road. She let his rifle be cleaned on the kitchen table, and she had the patience of a mother who had spent her own childhood watching for ships. When the boy came home late, shaken and mud-stained after his first real hunt, she fed him, gave him a dry shirt and did not say one word about it until he began to talk. Ezekiel said afterwards that his mother had been the first person to teach him that a slayer's real strength lay in having somewhere to come home. Family life was not without its griefs. Her father Hezekiah Osgood died in 1795, when Rachel was thirty and her children were still small, and her mother Rachel Cole, who lived on until 1819, moved in with her for the last years of her life and sewed by the fire. Her sister Lucy, who stayed near the coast and kept up the old links with the harbour towns, wrote regularly, and Rachel received news of Marblehead in letters full of ships and weddings and drownings. The Proctor rivalry was a distant thing in her household. She knew of it as a subject of family pride and mild exasperation, since every Faulkner over the age of fifteen had an opinion of the Guest, the vampire that had escaped at Towton in 1461 and that both ledgers blamed each other for losing, and she was fond of saying, dryly, that five hundred years was a long time to hold a grudge over one bad night's work. She kept the peace at the table when the cousins argued about it. Silas outlived her by fifteen years, and it is his loss she was spared. Rachel died in 1829, aged sixty-four, in a fall from a horse. She had ridden out on a wet morning in the spring to look at a field with her son-in-law, and the mare, a steady old animal, put a foot into a hidden drain on a slope and went down. She was thrown against a stone wall and lived only a few hours. Silas Goodwin lived until 1844, keeping the shop until his hands would no longer hold the spokeshave. In the Faulkner family's memory Rachel is remembered as a woman who kept the house that made a hunter possible. She does not appear in the Red Ledger as a slayer, but a note in the margin credits her with the raising of Ezekiel, and later generations of Faulkners spoke of her with respect. Her place in the Slayerverse is the one held by all those steadfast households, the farm wives and mothers of hunters, who never lifted a rifle but who made sure that the ones who did had bread, a bed and a lamp in the window when they came in from the dark.