Nicholas Slater

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

Nicholas Slater worked with leather for fifty years, and the shop in which he did it smelled, on wet days, like a wet cow and on dry days like a warm one. He was born in 1649 in the village of Read, Lancashire, a small place in the shadow of Pendle Hill, near Whalley, where the fields ran up into moorland and the houses were built of local stone with heavy flagged roofs against the wind. His father Robert Slater was a clerk and his mother Gunnora Faulkner a housekeeper, and he had an older brother, Kit Faulkner, who would become a ferryman on the Ribble. Where Kit took their mother's family name, Nicholas kept their father's, so that the two brothers went through life under different names, which caused no confusion in the family and a great deal among the neighbours. The Read of his boyhood was a hand-loom village in the sense that most cottages held a loom, and the dry rattle of shuttles came through the windows on every working day. The hills held sheep, the valleys held oats, and the traffic that mattered came along the packhorse road, carried on the backs of ponies with bells on their harness. That road created a need for riders, and riders needed saddles. Nicholas was apprenticed at fourteen to a saddler in Whalley, a bald, ill-tempered man who had once made harness for a regiment of horse in the civil wars and never tired of saying so. The apprenticeship lasted seven years, as such things did, and it taught him the whole business from hide to finished seat: how to choose leather and cure it, how to cut it with a round knife, how to stitch with waxed thread and two needles, how to stuff a pannel with wool flock so that it would not gall a horse. When he had served his term he set up on his own account in a small workshop attached to a house at the edge of the village. The trade suited his temperament, which was careful and exact, more like his father's than his brother's. A good saddle was an intimate piece of work, made to the back of a particular animal and the seat of a particular rider, and Nicholas had a gift for it. He measured, he asked questions about how a man sat, and he made adjustments after a week's use without being asked. Farmers came for work saddles, drovers for pack harness, and gentlemen, in due course, for the well-finished sort with brass fittings and a stitched pattern along the skirt. He kept a book of orders in his father's handwriting style, clean and slightly slanted, and never forgot a customer's name. What his customers did not know was that the shop was also a listening post. Riders came from all along the roads through the Ribble valley, and a saddler learns much from what he is asked to mend. Nicholas noticed when a horse came in with its harness torn at the stirrup as if dragged, or when a rider paid in old coin and asked that the work be done by nightfall. He noted the men who wanted their tack for night riding, who would not leave a horse in a stable after dusk, whose animals trembled and would not enter certain villages. All of it went to his brother Kit and through Kit to the Faulkner slayers, on scraps of paper carried in the pouch of a ferryman. He was not a slayer and never had the calling, but the Red Ledger of the period contains several entries that begin, in Kit's hand, with the words: from the saddler at Read. Nicholas never married and had no children. It was not that he lacked warmth; his nephews and nieces of the wider family remembered him as a tolerant, dry-humoured man who kept boiled sweets in a drawer of the workbench and gave them out without comment. But the shop was his life, and he was content with it. He lived above it in two rooms, took his meals from a widow who lived opposite, and went on Sundays to the chapel where the old Lancashire recusant families sat a little apart. Religion in that part of the county was a knotted matter, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenting neighbours living close together and generally avoiding the subject, and Nicholas held to a cautious Anglican habit and never quarrelled with anyone about it. His mother Gunnora died in 1675, when he was twenty-six, and he took her death hard, more visibly than Kit did. He made a saddle for the man who dug the grave and never told him why. His father lived on until 1690, and in those last years the old clerk would come to the shop and sit on a stool with a pipe, watching his son cut leather, saying little. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 passed over the village largely without effect, though the county's gentry were divided and the talk in the shop for a season was full of who had taken which oath. Nicholas kept his own counsel, made his saddles, and paid his taxes, which the new government, needing money for its wars, raised regularly. The Proctors of Yorkshire were, for him, a matter of gossip and of trade. A saddle made in Yorkshire was known to be stitched differently from one made in Lancashire, and the difference was a small matter of local pride: a Proctor rider on a Yorkshire saddle passing through the valley would be noticed and talked about. The old feud, the rivalry of the two ledgers, was to Nicholas a family joke that had grown solemn with age, and he observed that at least the Proctors had the sense to buy their leather from the same tanners. On the matter of the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461, he took the cautious position that no one alive could know who was at fault. He died in 1720 of a winter cough, aged 71, in the rooms above the workshop, with a half-finished saddle on the bench below. The shop passed to an apprentice, and the pattern of the stitching survived in the village for another generation, known as the Slater seam. In the modern Slayerverse he is honoured as one of the quiet auxiliaries of the Faulkner line, a craftsman who never held a stake but whose careful noticing ran through the pages of the Red Ledger, and the family still speaks of a well-made thing as good Read work.