Rebecca Faulkner Cooke

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sure Ledger. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Rebecca Faulkner Cooke was born in 1732 in Andover, Massachusetts, in a house that smelled of ink, lampblack and paper, since her father, Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke, born in 1704, was a printer. He ran a small press in a front room with a hand-pulled machine of oak and iron, turning out almanacs, broadsides, sermons and the occasional election notice, and the children of the household grew up with ink under their nails. Her mother, Rosamund Hamilton, born in 1699, was a dairywoman from a farming family on the edge of the parish, a broad-shouldered, quiet woman who kept cows and made butter. The household had an odd secret. Rosamund was a vampire slayer, known in the hunters' correspondence as the Gentle Kestrel, and the printer's wife who sold cheese on market days was also a watcher of dusk roads with a long rifle. Rebecca was descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and the Faulkner name in her middle position marked her as a child of the house that kept the Red Ledger. The town of her childhood was a pious, orderly, agricultural place, where the meetinghouse bell set the rhythm of the week and the cider mills groaned in autumn. Andover's farms lay in long strips along the Shawsheen and Merrimack, with stone walls and orchards, and its people worried about the weather, the price of grain and the state of their souls in roughly that order. Printing, in that world, was a trade of some standing, since it carried the news, the law and the word of God. Ezekiel's almanacs, full of tide tables, planting signs and bad poetry, were in half the houses of the county, and Rebecca learned to set type, to lock a forme and to read backwards before she could read forwards. She also learned to count. In the printer's trade every sheet was tallied, and a child who could keep a tally of quires and reams could keep any sort of ledger. She had one sister, Phebe Faulkner Cooke, born in 1733, a year after her, and the two girls were inseparable and utterly unalike. Phebe was quick, flighty and warm; Rebecca was slow to speak, exact in her habits and rather formidable even at ten. Phebe too would become a slayer, but that lay in the future. What the sisters shared, in childhood, was a mother who took them out on long autumn walks and taught them, without seeming to teach, to read a hedgerow, a track, a field wall and a night sky. Rosamund's gift, and later Rebecca's, was to see where things had been. A flattened patch of grass, a broken twig, a dead crow set out too neatly on a fencepost, all told a story, and the girls learned to read those stories the way other children learned their catechism. Tragedy fell in 1746, when Rebecca was fourteen. Her father died, worn out by ink fumes and long hours, and left the press to be wound down. Rosamund sold the type and the machine, and the family lived on the dairy. Rebecca went into service for a time in a shopkeeper's household in the town, learning how a store was run: how to order from the Boston wholesalers, how to price goods, how to manage credit, how to spot a bad shilling and a worse customer. By the time she was twenty she had saved enough, with a small loan from her mother, to take a lease on a shop of her own, a narrow, high-ceilinged building on the main street where she sold groceries, hardware, cloth, and candles. It prospered. Her prices were fair and her memory for debts was proverbial, and a farmer who tried to slip past his account would find it recited to him, to the penny, at the counter. The calling came in 1759, when she was twenty-seven. It came, as such things did, at a funeral. A prominent man of the parish had died, the whole town turned out, and the coffin was carried to the burying ground and set beside the open grave. When the lid was raised for the final farewell, the coffin was found empty. The mourners looked at one another and could not say why, a murmur went round about a mistake at the undertaker's, and the minister, flustered, ordered the service to go on with the lid closed. Rebecca stood at the back, and what she felt was not fear but recognition. She looked at the ground, at the marks in the grass, at the direction of a line of bent stems leading away from the tomb, and she knew exactly which way to go. That night she took her mother's rifle from behind the door. She became known by the alias The Sure Ledger, a name that combined her habit of exactness with her position as the keeper of a hard tally. Her archetype was the Soldier, disciplined and methodical, and her craft was Quarry Reading, the same gift her mother had used on the autumn walks, refined into a working art. From the faintest disturbance she could tell how long ago a creature had passed, how heavy it was, whether it was hurt, and which direction it had gone. It made her a superb tracker and an even better strategist, since she often knew where a vampire was going before the vampire did. Her gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, and she cast the shot herself, in the back room of the shop, behind a counter piled with calico. She had no formal mentor. Her mother, the Gentle Kestrel, had given her the outline of the work on those autumn walks, but Rosamund had died three years before the calling, and Rebecca made the rest up as she went along. Her hunting years were the years of the Revolution and its prelude, and she worked them in a district thick with militia, pickets and suspicion. The evidence of her ledger entries is patient, accurate and unhurried. She tracked a lone feeder along the Merrimack for the better part of a month in the winter of 1762, working from the timing of missing livestock. She cleared a cellar in a Haverhill warehouse after a shipping clerk noticed an odd rot in a load of salt fish. She was a stern, exact, unshowy hunter who declined to count a tally until she had seen the body. The Red Ledger's keepers in Massachusetts came to trust her figures over anyone else's, and in the rivalry with the Proctor house, whose own White Ledger kept a rival account in Pennsylvania and Virginia, her entries were the ones the Faulkners pointed to when a Yorkist correspondent questioned the arithmetic. The old quarrel over the Guest, who escaped at Towton in 1461 in the Wars of the Roses, she treated as a question of evidence, and she thought that neither family had any. She never married. The family record is clear on this, and Rebecca herself, asked once by a cousin, said that a shopkeeper who was also a hunter had no room for a husband and no wish to lie to one. She had no children. Instead she looked after her mother, who died in 1756, three years before the calling, and after that her sister Phebe, who became a fellow hunter and worked beside her across the years. The two of them ran the shop and the ledger from a shared back room, and to the town they were the Misses Cooke, unmarried sisters of a certain age who kept a good store. She lived to see the Republic and a new century, the shop passing quietly into the hands of a young clerk she had trained. The winter of 1806 was a hard one, with deep snow and bitter cold through January, and Rebecca died in it, aged seventy-four, of the hard winter itself, in her own bed above the shop. The town gave her a large funeral, and the coffin, the mourners noted, was very properly full. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the Sure Ledger, the tracker who never counted a tally she had not seen, and the Red Ledger entries in her hand are still the model that Faulkner keepers are taught to imitate.