Robert Slater

Spouse of Gunnora Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Robert Slater came into the world in 1624 at Downham, a small stone village under the eastern flank of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, close enough to Clitheroe that its people counted the castle as their own and far enough from anywhere else that they had opinions about everything. He was born into no ledger and no house of hunters, and the family papers name no parents for him. What they preserve is the man he became: careful, literate, and not especially bold, a clerk who married into a family with a secret and made it his business to keep it. His surname was that of ordinary Lancashire people, and he did not pretend to more. The district he grew up in had a bad reputation and a good memory. The Pendle witch trials of 1612 were within the recollection of every older neighbour, and the trials had made the hill famous in a way its people found a mixed blessing. Robert learned early that a country of superstition is a country of small fears, and that a clear-headed man could make himself useful by writing things down accurately. He got his letters from a curate at Downham church, where the Assheton family, who held the manor, took an interest in local schooling. A boy who could write a legible hand and reckon a rent roll might find a place in a lawyer's office at Clitheroe, and that is what he did, going as a lad of fifteen or so and coming home at weekends with a bundle of bread. He rose by inches. From copying deeds he moved to drafting them, and from drafting to keeping the accounts of a small estate. He was an untidy man in his dress, with his coat buttoned wrong and ink on his cuffs, but his figures were exact, and landowners of the district began to ask for him by name. He was no soldier, and the civil wars pressed on him more as a nuisance than a call to arms. Clitheroe Castle changed hands, muster rolls were drawn up and burned, and clerks who could keep quiet about which lord's tenants had paid which side found themselves in demand. Robert took no side in public. In private he leaned toward Parliament for the sake of the roads, and he never discussed it. In 1646 he married Gunnora Faulkner, then twenty-seven and five years his senior, a housekeeper of the House of Faulkner who had been born in 1619. Their courtship, if it can be so called, was conducted across a desk. Gunnora ran the domestic side of a gentleman's house near Whalley, and Robert was sent there to audit the accounts, and after three days of checking receipts against stores he found that her books balanced to the farthing. He said so, which was the closest thing to a compliment he had ever paid, and she said that she had expected as much. They were married at the parish church the following spring, or so the family recalled, and moved into a small house at the edge of Clitheroe with a garden and a view of the castle rock. Gunnora brought with her the knowledge that her family kept the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian tally of vampires taken since the Wars of the Roses, and that she was not permitted to speak of it. It fell to her to tell her husband. She waited until after the wedding, as the custom was, and told him over supper, laying the ledger on the table between the bread and the salt. Robert read it for an hour without a word. He then asked whether the entries were checked against any independent record, and Gunnora, who had been expecting alarm, laughed until she cried. From that evening he treated the tally as a working document rather than a family scandal, and he was soon proposing improvements to how it was ruled and indexed. They had two sons. Kit Faulkner was born in 1647, the year after the wedding, and took his mother's surname according to the family custom by which a name so often ran through the women. Nicholas Slater followed in 1649 and kept his father's. The arrangement pleased Robert, who saw no reason why a household should not hold two surnames when it held two ledgers, his own account books and the Faulkner tally. Both boys grew up in a house where records were kept punctiliously, where a lie about a figure was a serious offence, and where certain subjects were mentioned only behind closed doors. Neither became a slayer, but both lived long lives, Kit dying in 1723 and Nicholas in 1720, and both were counted trustworthy by the cousins who did the hunting. Robert's usefulness to the Faulkners was of a specific kind. He was the sort of clerk that a hunting family needs and rarely finds: someone who could search parish registers, read manorial rolls, and trace a suspicious burial or a missing traveller through the official record without arousing comment. On a dozen occasions between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution he provided a Faulkner hunter with a name, a date or a boundary that turned a fruitless week into a single night's work. He never handled a stake and never pretended to. His only weapons were a quill and a trained memory, and he seemed content with them. Like every Lancashire man of his generation he held opinions about the Proctors of Yorkshire. He held them lightly. He had once been sent to York on estate business and had come home with a story of a Yorkist clerk who had corrected his arithmetic in front of an alderman, and he treated the whole Faulkner and Proctor contest as something between a football match and a lawsuit. He did admit that the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton, remained an insult to both houses, and he kept a small file on every credible sighting reported in the north since 1461. The great plague year of 1665 he spent mostly at his desk, drafting orders for the quarantine of infected houses, and he outlived Gunnora, who died in 1675, by fifteen years. In his last decade he grew stiff and cautious, but he kept riding out to visit the outlying estates he had once served. In 1690, at the age of sixty-six, his horse stumbled on a wet lane, and he died of the fall. His sons buried him at Clitheroe beside his wife. Robert Slater is remembered by the Faulkners as the man from outside who made the Red Ledger better, an in-law who understood that a tally is only worth something if it can be checked. In the wider Slayerverse he stands for the mild, dependable people who married into slayer families and stayed to serve them.