Godfrey Duckworth measured Lancashire for a living, with a chain, a staff and a plane table, and he measured it honestly in an age when many of his neighbours did not. Born in 1579 in Blackburn, Lancashire, he became a surveyor, a trade that put him on the moors, in the manor courts and at the edge of countless disputes about where one man's field stopped and another's began. He married a Faulkner, a woman who hunted vampires by night and wove cloth by day, and he spent thirty-three years as her widower carrying her memory, raising her daughter and keeping the ledger of her family's work in the only way he knew how, which was with exact figures.
Blackburn in his boyhood was a market town at the foot of the Pennine moors, with a parish church, a grammar school and a scatter of weavers' cottages along the streams that fed the river Darwen. Its people made woollen cloth and coarse linen, bred sheep on the high ground and argued incessantly about common rights, tithes and the price of a load of peat. Land was the great subject of the district. The dissolution of the monasteries fifty years earlier had thrown abbey estates onto the market, new owners had enclosed strips their grandfathers had grazed, and a whole class of lawyers, stewards and surveyors had grown up to draw the lines. Godfrey's father, whose name the family papers do not preserve, was a small tenant farmer who found himself in one such dispute and was struck by how much depended on a piece of parchment with a clear map.
He was a thin, stooped, exact boy with a good head for arithmetic, and the vicar of the parish, seeing it, arranged for him to learn his letters and then his geometry. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a surveyor who worked for the great estates of the district, and he learned the craft as it was practised in the days of Elizabeth. He learned to lay out a base line with a measuring chain of iron links, to take bearings with a circumferentor and a plane table, to reduce a field to acres, roods and perches, and to draw the result in ink on vellum with a border and a compass rose. The measure was the statute acre, but the customary acres of different manors varied, and part of the surveyor's art was knowing which one a document meant. He copied deeds, walked bounds with the old men who remembered where the stones had been, and slept in barns.
His character was plain to those who dealt with him. He was slow to speak, slower to take offence, and would not alter a figure to please a client, even the gentleman who paid him. That stubbornness cost him work early on, but it earned him something more valuable, which was a reputation among the small freeholders and yeomen that his measurements could be trusted in court. He took a modest pleasure in the small things: a good pen, a straight edge, a clear morning on the moor. His hands were always stained, and he wrote his notes in a tiny upright script that saved paper and defeated casual readers.
In 1602 he was sent to Padiham to chain out the boundaries of a farm on the edge of the moor, and he lodged in the town for three weeks. The weaver he met there was Sabina Faulkner, twenty-four years old, sharp-featured and unafraid, who bought yarn from the same spinners as everyone else and measured every piece of cloth in front of the buyer. When she looked over his shoulder at a page of his calculations and told him that one of his sums did not add up, he was so surprised that he checked it, and found that she was right. That was the beginning. They married in 1602 and set up house in a stone cottage by the church at Padiham, with her loom in the upper room and his drawing table beneath the window.
He learned what the Faulkners were within a few months. Sabina told him plainly, on a night when she had come in late with mud on her hem and a torn sleeve, and he sat with the information for a time and then asked for details, as a surveyor would. What did the creatures look like in daylight? Where did they lair? What ground was likeliest? Once he began to think of it as a problem of territory, he discovered that he was useful. He drew maps of the parishes around Padiham, marking every cellar, barn, disused lime-kiln and abandoned farm where a vampire might lie up, and he plotted the movements reported by the neighbours until patterns appeared. Sabina took the maps out with her and the family's hunters used them for a generation.
Their daughter Florence Faulkner was born in 1604. Godfrey adored her with a quiet and undemonstrative intensity, and he taught her to read a map before she could read a primer. The following year Sabina was called as a vampire slayer, when the horses in a Padiham stable screamed and a groom was found cold, and Godfrey rearranged his working life around her hunting: he kept the evenings free, carried the lantern, and learned to tie a bandage and to hold his tongue. He did not go into the cellars himself, not because he was afraid but because, as he told his brother-in-law Nicholas Faulkner, a man who is not called has no business in the way of those who are.
Sabina died in 1606, falling from a roof during a chase, and Godfrey was left with a two-year-old daughter and the family maps. He did not remarry. He moved back into his work with a grim concentration, and took on more of the estate surveys in the Blackburn hundred, partly because the money was steady and partly because he could not bear to be idle. Iona Thorne, his mother-in-law, died the year after, and it fell to him and to Nicholas to keep the girl in touch with her father's family. He made sure that Florence grew up in the Faulkner circle, learned her mother's craft in due time and knew her lineage. He handed over the maps to her, one by one, as she was ready.
The years that followed were hard ones in Lancashire. Bad harvests, plague, and a run of cold winters bore down on the county throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century. Godfrey worked through most of it, surveying the estates of families who were struggling to hold what they had, and took on the work of recording, for the parish, where the plague burials had been laid so that the ground would be left alone. In 1639, when the sickness returned to the district, he was called to measure a plot for a pit and caught the plague himself. He died that year at the age of sixty. Florence, then in her middle thirties, buried him beside her mother's memorial.
The Red Ledger has no line in his name, because he took no vampires, but a cousin's note in the margin says that the Faulkners of that generation hunted from his maps. In the tradition of the Slayerverse, Godfrey Duckworth is remembered as the surveyor who married into the family, drew the country the hunters walked, and raised the daughter who carried her mother's work forward.
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