Richard Marsden was born in 1612 in Clitheroe, Lancashire, beneath the small square keep that stands on its knob of limestone above the town, and he spent the first years of his life within the sound of a smith's hammer and the smell of limekilns. The records say nothing of his parents or of any brothers and sisters, and the family accepted this gap without embarrassment. A boy in Clitheroe in 1612 might have come from any of a hundred cottage families, and what mattered was what he made of himself. What he made was a cooper, and by the time he was in his sixties he had become the most respected barrel-maker between the Ribble and the Wenning.
Clitheroe was, in his youth, a small borough with a market charter, a grammar school and a great many sheep. Its economy ran on wool, on the hides tanned at the riverside, on the limestone quarries and on the traffic of the roads to Yorkshire, which crossed the Pennine edge a few miles north. Coopers were needed there for the ale of a dozen inns, the butter and cheese sent to market, the salted meat laid down each November and the tallow and pitch barrels of the tanners. Richard was bound apprentice in his early teens to an old cooper near the churchyard, a man who taught him to shave a stave until it sang against the drawknife, and who held that the only sin in the trade was a leak. By twenty he could raise a cask in an afternoon, and by twenty-three he had opened a workshop of his own with a pair of lathes, a heap of seasoned oak, and a fine, sour smell of new wood that followed him wherever he went.
He met Anne Faulkner through the trade. Her family, which kept the Red Ledger, had a farm and a brewhouse on the edge of the Forest of Pendle, and Richard was called out to fit it with new casks. Anne was twenty, a herbalist, tall and freckled, with a habit of correcting his measurements, and he was shrewd enough to see that she was usually right. They were married in 1637 at Clitheroe, and the marriage was, by the testimony of everyone who knew them, a partnership of two people who had found the only other person in the county who made sense to them. He was not a slayer and never claimed the title. But he understood in a short time, with the quiet good sense that ran through his character, that his wife's family had a private business, and that a cooper's cart could go anywhere without anyone asking why.
His usefulness to the Red Ledger was of a practical kind. A cooper builds vessels and knows what can be hidden in them, and Richard built the family a set of casks with false bottoms, in which stakes, salt and lamp oil travelled the county under the noses of constables and tithe-collectors. He made ash and hawthorn staves for the slayers' use, seasoning them slowly in his loft, and he built a barrel-shaped, iron-banded coffer that a Lancashire slayer could seal, roll and bury, which the ledgers credit with the safe disposal of at least one dangerous body. He did it all with a dry, unemphatic humour, and the phrase that survives in the family papers, that a barrel is only a well that has learned to travel, is his.
The wars came to his door in the 1640s. The civil wars split the northern gentry and turned the roads around Clitheroe into the movements of armies. Anne, by then in her late twenties, took a position that no one could have predicted: she became a herbalist and physician's assistant in a besieged household, one of the great Lancashire houses that held out through a long investment, where the physician was overworked and the supplies of salves, purges and bandages were dwindling. Richard stayed behind with their first child Judith Faulkner, born in 1639, and ran the workshop and the house on his own. He wrote to Anne in the little script coopers use for tally marks, since letters through the siege lines were rare and often opened, and the family kept the few notes that reached her. When the siege was lifted she came home thin, sunburnt from the roof leads and unable to sleep for a month, and he built her a bed in the workshop, where the smell of oak was, she said, the only thing that let her rest.
Their son Josiah Faulkner was born in 1646, in the aftermath of the fighting, and their youngest, Helen Faulkner, in 1654, when the Commonwealth's soldiers had settled into the garrisons and the country was, for a time, quieter. All three children became slayers. Richard trained none of them and interfered with none of them, and he accepted, with the same patience he showed to a slow-drying stave, that his children would be lost to him for nights at a time. He kept a lamp burning in the workshop window for them, and the ledgers note that in fifty years the lamp never once went out on a night that a Marsden child was abroad. Judith would die in 1690, the same year as her mother, and Helen in the same year, but that was long after his own time.
He was not a man who talked about the feud with the White Ledger, and yet he kept a sharp eye on how it touched the trade. Yorkshire coopers regularly crossed the hills to sell into Lancashire, and the slayers of the Proctor side were rumoured to keep their own barrels with their own secrets. Richard, who knew the craft better than any of them, was quite capable of telling whether a Yorkshire cask had a false bottom by the sound of it under a knuckle, and he did so, on at least one occasion, in a market square with a Proctor watching. The Proctor said nothing, took his cask, and, the ledger records, nodded to him afterwards in the street for twenty years. He counted that as his best reputation.
In 1665, the year the great plague fell on London, he was fifty-three and Clitheroe was full of rumours and quarantines. He stayed at his bench, lit sulphur fires for the neighbours, and hooped several hundred vinegar barrels for the town's authorities, which is the only work of his that was ever paid for in advance. His wife survived him by six years, and he died in 1684 at the age of seventy-two, of a hard winter that closed the Pennine roads for weeks and froze the Ribble at its edges. He was buried at Clitheroe. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the cooper who married into the Red Ledger and never once asked to be written into it, and whose casks carried a great deal more than ale.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
