Denys Marsden

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Fowler. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Denys Marsden was born in 1480 at Garstang in Lancashire, the younger son of Roger Marsden, a tanner, and Amice Faulkner, a midwife's apprentice who was also, though the neighbours did not know it, a slayer known as The Wary Reeve. His elder brother was Edward Faulkner, born two years before him, who kept their mother's family name; Denys took his father's. The family lived where the river Wyre came down out of the Bowland fells onto the flat farmland of the Fylde, and Garstang was a market town of some importance, with a Thursday market, a bridge, and a long main street lined with alehouses and cattle pens. Everything in it smelled of hides, hay and wet animals, and the tanner's household was not the sweetest in the street. He was a restless and observant child. While Edward took to the mill and to the slow craft of waiting, Denys took to the heights. From the time he could walk he was out on the fells above Garstang, following the shepherds, learning the names of the hills, the dangerous places, the points at which a mist could come down in ten minutes and lose a man for a night. He was shepherd by trade, and a good one: he knew each ewe by its fleece and voice, he kept dogs that ran without being shouted at, and he could find a strayed lamb in a blizzard. It was a solitary and poorly paid life, lived in a stone hut on the moor and a rough plaid against the wind, but he loved it, and in the long hours alone he developed the habit of looking at every horizon as if it were writing. That habit was later to have a name. Denys became known, in the trade language of his family, for a craft called Beacon Reading, and it was rooted in the fells. The high country of Lancashire was dotted with beacon hills, the signal points from which fire could be shown to give warning of Scottish raiders or invasion from the sea, and the shepherds who lived beside them knew their meaning: which fire was a warning, which was a muster, which was a burning barn. Denys read fires the way other men read letters. He could look at a distant glow in the dark and tell whether it was a hearth, a haystack, a charcoal burner or something that had no business burning. In time he learned to read something else: the places where fires were not lit, the villages that went dark too early, the farm whose lamp had not shown for a week. He put these patterns together and drew from them the position of things that hunted at night. His mother died in 1502, when he was twenty-two, and he watched Edward take up the ledger. Denys was not called then and did not expect to become a vampire slayer at all. He went on with the sheep, took a small tenancy on the lower slopes, and spent the next decade as a person whom the district thought of as the quieter of the two brothers. He was tall, dark, with a sharp nose and a bearing that his neighbours considered proud, and it was this that earned him, in time, the alias The Proud Fowler: proud because he carried his head high, and fowler because he hunted from a hide, patiently, with a lure. The calling came in 1512, on a night in late autumn, and it was a strange one. A sleeper in a house on the moor's edge, an elderly woman living alone, was found dead in her bed with every candle in the room burned down to the socket. There was no sign of a struggle. The candles, a dozen of them, had been lit one after another and had been left to burn, and the pool of tallow on the floor had run to the door. Denys, who had been sent for by a neighbour because he was the nearest shepherd, stood in the doorway and looked at the room, and understood with a sudden and terrible clarity what the candles were for. They had been lit to keep something at bay, and they had failed. He was thirty-two. He walked out of the house, climbed to the nearest beacon hill, and watched the countryside for the rest of the night. Beacon Reading became the basis of his hunting. He carried a matchlock pistol, a heavy and clumsy piece that needed a slow-match kept lit in the wind, and he never quite trusted it, but he carried it for the noise as much as for the shot. His real weapons were hawthorn stakes, cut in the hedges and hardened, and his knowledge of the ground. The archetype assigned to him is Hunter, and it fits: he did not investigate or fight in the open, but tracked, waited and struck where the creature was accustomed to feed. In the three years that remained to him he added a brisk number of entries to the Red Ledger, in a hand that was clear and rather cramped, and his tally was respected even by hunters who disliked his manner. The year 1513 was the year of Flodden, and it drew men from every northern parish, including, that autumn, several of his neighbours. It was also the year in which his father died. Roger Marsden, the tanner, had been failing for some time, and he died at fifty-seven, in his bed, in the house in Garstang. Denys buried him beside his wife. He never married, and no children are recorded. The two brothers were now the only survivors of their household, and they saw each other more often, riding across the moor to meet at an alehouse halfway, where they argued, as they had always argued, about how to hunt. Edward wanted preparation; Denys wanted patience of another sort. His relations with the Proctors of the White Ledger were unremarkable. He knew the family's name, of course; he knew that each house blamed the other for the escape of the Guest at Towton, and he thought the quarrel foolish, since neither had ever seen the creature. He said once, in the hearing of a Proctor cousin, that the two ledgers would do better to compare their maps than their grievances, and the remark went round the north for a season. He died in 1515, at thirty-five, from a blow taken in a churchyard. The circumstances were briefly told in the ledger: he had gone to a parish churchyard at dusk to watch a grave that he suspected, and he had been struck from behind by something that he never saw. Edward found him in the morning, still breathing, and he lived long enough to say what he had heard. The churchyard was closed for a month. Denys was buried at Garstang beside his parents. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the shepherd who read the fires, a man of proud carriage and short years, whose hilltop watches gave the Red Ledger some of its most exact entries.