On the evening of a wet day in 1605, the horses in a Padiham stable began to scream, and by the time Sabina Faulkner had crossed the yard with a lantern the groom was lying in the straw, cold to the touch and beyond any help. That was her calling. It came late, when she was twenty-seven and already a wife and mother, and it made of a weaver a vampire slayer who would live barely another year. In the Red Ledger she is entered under the name The Steady Latch, a title given by cousins who remembered that no door she had ever closed had come open again.
She was born in 1578 in Padiham, Lancashire, the third child of Ralph Faulkner, a forester on the edge of Pendle, and Iona Thorne, a seamstress from a border-reiver family. Her brothers were Quentin, born in 1575, William, born in 1576, and, later, Nicholas, born in 1583. Padiham was a small stone town on the river Calder below Pendle Hill, with a market, a parish church of ancient foundation and a scattering of hand-loom cottages whose upper storeys were given over to the long, wide windows that let the light fall on the cloth. The place lived on wool and linen, and in most households the loom was the centre of the room, working from before dawn until the tallow ran out. Sabina grew up beside one. By the age of ten she could throw a shuttle across a warp without dropping a thread, and by fourteen she was contributing her own pieces to the weekly cloth sale.
She was a compact, upright girl with a sharp nose, heavy black brows and a level stare, and the family described her as stubborn in the way that a good latch is stubborn. She disliked idleness and disliked being managed, and she had a bluntness that got her into trouble with the churchwardens and with the neighbours' wives. She also had her mother's gift with a needle and her father's feel for weather. It was said that she could look at a hillside and tell whether the sheep on it were uneasy, and that she noticed a change in the mood of a house before its inhabitants did. It was not yet a talent she could name, and it would be years before she had reason to.
Weaving of the day was a demanding trade. A weaver of woollen broadcloth or coarse linen worked a hand-loom of oak, with a warp beam, a heddle frame and a foot treadle, and prepared her own bobbins and shuttle from beech and boxwood. She bought yarn from spinners who worked in the cottages round about, dressed the warp with size, and wove a piece that might run to thirty yards, then carried it to a fulling mill to be finished. Payment was by the piece, delivered to the clothier who supplied the wool, and it was easy to be cheated on the measure. Sabina insisted on measuring every piece in front of the buyer, and the clothiers of the Calder valley learned to expect it.
In 1602, at twenty-four, she married Godfrey Duckworth, a surveyor from Blackburn who had come to Padiham to chain out the boundaries of a farm on the edge of the moor. He was a lean, methodical man with ink under his nails and a habit of stopping mid-sentence to write down a figure. She was captivated by the way he turned a field into a set of numbers, and he by the fact that she was the only person in the district who checked his sums and found an error. Their marriage was warm and practical. They lived in a stone cottage near the church, with the loom in the upper room and his drawing table under the window, and in 1604 their daughter Florence Faulkner was born. The custom of the family held that the surname passed through the daughters, and the girl was christened a Faulkner.
The calling in the stable came the next year. The groom had been a friend, and the animal that Sabina found in the stall, though nothing had been wrong with it an hour earlier, was too still. She looked up into the rafters and met, at the far end of the dusty beams, something that looked down and smiled. She did not scream. She did what she had been told as a girl in a lesson she had not understood, which was to go to the door, drop the latch behind her and stay on the right side of it. The vampire, which had been feeding on stable hands across the parish, hesitated on the beam. It was a full minute before she found the hawthorn stake she had once been given to keep in a linen bag, and another before her mother came running from the lane to take the far side of the stall. When it was over, Iona Thorne, called The Wild Wren, said simply that it was time.
Under her mother's instruction, Sabina learned the discipline the family called Dusk Patrol. It was the art of walking a district in the last hour of daylight and the first of night, watching who came and went, and reading the town by its own habits so that any change stood out. The Archetype the ledger's clerks assigned her was Soldier, meaning that she did her work by routine and in company rather than by cunning alone, and that she stood a watch as other people stand a post. She wore a plain wool cloak with a stake sewn into the hem and carried a flintlock pistol and a set of hawthorn stakes. The pistol she treated with distrust; a wet night could spoil the priming. She used it to summon help and relied on the stake to end a fight.
For about a year she walked the Padiham lanes, took her place in cellar hunts with her mother and her brothers, and entered a number of vampires in the Red Ledger in a firm, upright hand. She and Godfrey arranged their household so that he was home with Florence on the evenings she went out, and he learned to carry a lantern and to tie a bandage. He never flinched at what she told him, and he never asked her to stop. The rivalry with the Proctors of Yorkshire was, in her world, a matter for the older members of the family, and she gave it little thought beyond noting that a taken vampire was a taken vampire whichever ledger it went into.
In 1606, chasing a vampire across the roofs of a row of Padiham cottages in the dusk, she lost her footing on a wet slate and fell. She was twenty-eight. The vampire was found and finished the following night by her mother and her brother Nicholas, and the Red Ledger's marginal note for the year records the Latch as fallen but not failed. Her husband Godfrey survived her by thirty-three years, and her daughter Florence would in time take up the calling that Sabina had held for so short a season. The Slayerverse remembers her as proof that a life could be turned in a single stable and be complete in a year.
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