Rosamund Hamilton

Spy slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Gentle Kestrel. Craft: Quarry Reading.

A child in a Concord schoolroom said, one wet morning in 1717, that there was a man standing in the corner who would not sit down, and the girl who heard it, Rosamund Hamilton, then seventeen years old, looked at the corner and saw nothing, and understood at once that she was supposed to see something. That moment, in a dame school near the meeting house, made her a vampire slayer. She had been born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1699, and she lived and hunted in the farms and harbour towns of the colony for another thirty-nine years, known in the Red Ledger as The Gentle Kestrel, and the family that she married into kept her entries in a small, careful hand. She was not born to a slayer house, and the Faulkner family, into which she married, did not choose her; she arrived by way of her own calling. Concord in her youth was a farming town on the Musketaquid, which the English called the Concord River, twenty miles inland from Boston, its fields divided by stone walls and its houses clustered near the meeting house and the burying ground on the hill. It was a place of Indian corn and rye, orchards, flax and small dairies, of town meetings and militia training days, and of a strong, sober Congregationalism. The wars with France on the frontier, the second of which had ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, had scarred the district, and there were widows in every street. Rosamund was raised in this world, taught to read from the primer and the Psalter, and trained from childhood to the dairy: milking, straining, setting the pans, skimming, churning and pressing cheese on the long slate slab in the buttery. She was strong in the forearm, quick with figures, and always the one who noticed when a cow had gone off her feed. At seventeen she was helping at the school for the smallest children, a dame school kept by a widow in a front room, when the calling came. A four-year-old, in the middle of the alphabet, stopped and said that the tall man in the corner had told her to be quiet. There was no man there. But Rosamund found that she was looking, without knowing why, at the exact spot where the child pointed, and that the hair on her arms had risen, and that her mind, quite calmly, was marking the place, the height and the angle of the light. The vampire, who had been lurking about the school to watch a family in the next house, went on its way. It was three nights later before she found it, following what she later called the quarry's habit of standing very still, and that first hunt she survived mainly by luck and a fire poker. Afterwards the craft revealed itself. She called it Quarry Reading, and it was the ability to read the small evidence of a hunted creature's presence, the flattened grass, the missing sound of the crickets, the way a room seemed to hold its breath, and to read it in the way a good dairywoman reads a cow. She had no mentor. There was an old Faulkner cousin in Boston who had known of the Red Ledger, and a schoolmaster who let her use his library, but for the practical business she was largely self-taught. Her gear was the long rifle that a neighbouring gunsmith made to her order, of the light, fast kind, and the silver-cast shot she poured herself in the dairy's copper kettle in the small hours. It is said that the buttery at her home smelled always of scalded milk and hot metal. She dressed for the job as a farm woman would, in a short gown, quilted petticoat and stout boots, with a wide-brimmed hat over her hair, and she was often overlooked. As the alias suggests, her manner was gentle. She approached her quarry the way she approached a heifer she did not want to frighten, and her spy's talent lay in patience, in appearing to be a country woman on some ordinary errand while she watched. In 1731 she married Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke, a printer, born in 1704, who worked at a press in Boston and had come out to Concord to see a man about paper. He was a Faulkner through his mother, and it was in the Faulkner family's meeting of blood relatives and outsiders that they became acquainted. Their courtship was unconventional. Ezekiel was as bookish as she was practical, and he was the one person she met who asked her, plainly and without alarm, what it was that she saw. He printed almanacs, broadsides and the occasional sermon, kept ink-black hands and a ledger of his own, and knew enough of the family's Red Ledger to keep his tongue. They set up house in a narrow brick-fronted building near the press and later removed to a farm outside Concord, where she resumed her dairy on a larger scale and he printed in the front room. Their daughters, Rebecca Faulkner Cooke and Phebe Faulkner Cooke, were born in 1732 and 1733, within thirteen months of each other, and both became slayers. Rebecca lived until 1806 and Phebe until 1802. Rosamund raised them in the dairy, with the rifle hanging over the door of the buttery and a small store of silver in a cheese-press drawer, and she taught them as she had taught herself: to notice things. The girls learned the craft from her in the manner in which other girls learned lace, at the kitchen table on winter evenings, and when they were old enough they went out with her. The record says she was strict about silence and gentle about mistakes. Her hunts in the harbour towns were varied. In 1738 she followed a vampire through the wharves of Salem, where it had taken lodgings in the loft of a sailmaker, by tracing the thing's habit of buying only at night from the same chandler. In 1744 and again in the war years that followed, when Massachusetts men marched off to Louisbourg, she used the confusion of militia musters to move unseen along the roads. Her tally in the Red Ledger stands at a respectable figure, and the entries concern themselves almost entirely with method, not violence. Ezekiel died in 1746, of causes the record does not give, and Rosamund carried on alone with her daughters at her side. Her death came in 1756. She was fifty-seven, an age at which most hunters had long retired, and she was pursuing a vampire across the roofs of a Massachusetts harbour town in the dusk when a rotten shingle gave way and she fell. It was a fall from a roof during a chase, and the daughters were with her. The thing they had been following was taken the same night, by Phebe, with the long rifle that had been their mother's. She is remembered in the Faulkner line as a quiet dairywoman whose eyes were as good as any hunter's, and whose daughters carried her craft into the next generation. In the Slayerverse the Gentle Kestrel is often named as the model of the hunter who did not need to be a Faulkner by birth to be one in every way that counted.