Sampson Faulkner

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

Garstang lay on the road from Lancaster to Preston, a small market town beside the River Wyre with a broad street built for cattle, and Sampson Faulkner was born there in 1539. The town had held its market charter for generations, and on market days the wide street filled with beasts, drovers, dealers and dogs, with the smell of dung and wet hides and the bawling of steers penned for sale. It was a place where a boy learned young to judge an animal by its walk. His father, Maurice Faulkner, was the son of a miller, and had married beyond the mill. His mother, Meg Thorne, was a dairymaid from the borderlands, and behind that plain description lay a good deal more. Meg was of the House of Thorne, the Northumbrian reivers turned Appalachian hunters in later centuries, and she was a vampire slayer known to the Red Ledger as The Still Beacon. He barely knew her. Meg Thorne died in 1542, when Sampson was three, and his memories of her were a scatter of sensations: a warm lap, a smell of whey and woodsmoke, a low voice singing something in a border dialect he could not follow. The household never spoke openly of how she had died, and the child was raised on a soft, vague story of a fever. The family told it more truthfully years later, when he was grown, that she had died in the field of her calling. Her nickname had come from her manner. A slayer is often restless, but Meg was steady as a lit lamp in a window, and men who had walked with her said that a night with her felt safer for the very quiet of her. Sampson inherited none of the craft, though he inherited the stillness. Maurice raised his two sons alone. Sampson was the elder, and his brother Humphrey Faulkner, born in 1541, was barely a year old when their mother died. The father was a gruff, honest man who had been schooled in the mill and had little patience for talk, and he put both boys to work as soon as they could carry a bucket. The house was small, near the market, with a yard where cattle were sometimes penned overnight, and it was there, among the borrowed beasts, that Sampson found his trade. He fell in with the drovers who brought stock from the hills and from Scotland down the long roads to the south, and by twelve he was running errands for them. By sixteen he was a working drover, walking beside the herds with a stick and a dog, and earning a wage in coin and beer. Droving was an old and honourable trade, and it was hard. A drover took cattle from the northern pastures, sometimes from as far off as the Scottish border, and walked them by slow stages to the fairs and markets of the English midlands and the south, where the meat-hungry towns would pay well. The beasts were shod for the road, their hooves fitted with iron cues, and the herd moved at two or three miles a day along the old green lanes, resting at the drovers' inns and the wide verges known to every man in the trade. A drover carried the money of the men who trusted him, and was licensed by the justices of the peace, and had to be at least thirty and married, though Sampson, who looked older than his years, was not always asked for his papers. He learned the roads, the fords, the fairs and the tricks of the dealers. He also learned to sleep in the open, in a wet cloak, with one ear cocked to the herd. He married in 1565, when he was twenty-six. His bride was Dionisia Tempest, a miller's daughter of twenty-three from the Wyre valley, and the match was a comfortable one, the drover's son of a miller's son marrying a miller's daughter in a country where everyone knew the price of grain. She was small, practical and cheerful, with a talent for cheese and a low tolerance for nonsense, and she made a home for him in a rented cottage on the edge of Garstang. Their wedding was held in the parish church, with a dinner of mutton and barley bread, and the drovers of the district turned up in force, rather more than the bride's family expected. It was said that Dionisia's mother counted the spoons after they left. The marriage, all the same, was good, and lasted forty years. Two sons came of it. Toby Faulkner, born in 1568, was a bright, wiry boy who took to the family's night business as a duck to water and became a vampire slayer in his own time. Norman Faulkner, born in 1572, was a stolid, careful child who followed his mother's line more than his father's, and grew up to be a steady man of the land. Sampson treated them with a gentle firmness. He took them out on the drove roads as soon as they were old enough, taught Toby to read the tracks of a herd and Norman to count the beasts at a gate, and told them both stories at night about their grandmother, whom he half-remembered and half-imagined. He did not push Toby toward the craft, and when the calling came he was quietly proud. The years of his manhood were crowded with public events. In 1569, when he was thirty, the rising of the northern earls sent armies across the north, and the roads on which he worked were suddenly thick with soldiers who wanted horses, beef and passage. Sampson lost a small herd to a requisitioning captain, and never entirely forgave it. He was paid, eventually, in worthless promises. Under Elizabeth the drovers were more heavily regulated, and the price of beef rose. In the summer of 1588, when he was forty-nine, the great Spanish Armada came up the Channel, and beacons were lit on the hills all along the coast, the chain of fires passing the alarm from headland to headland. The men of Garstang watched the glow on the horizon in silence. Sampson stood on the bridge with his sons, one of them twenty and the other sixteen, and said only that his mother's people had watched such fires before, on another border. His nickname among the drovers was Steady Sam, and he was known as a man who never lost a beast to carelessness. He was broad, brown and weathered, with a slow smile and a ready hand for a stranger on the road. He kept his own counsel and his own accounts. The Red Ledger records that he served the family's work as a sort of scout, using the drove roads to carry messages and report on strangers, and that he listened for talk of missing cattle, of animals found drained, and of herds that would not settle at night. More than once his observations led a hunter to a lair. He never wore the mantle of the craft, and did not seem to grieve for it. He died in 1593 in a fall from a horse. He was fifty-four, riding home from a market at Lancaster on a wet evening when his mare slipped on a stone causeway near the Wyre and threw him. He was found by a neighbour, and died the next day. Dionisia outlived him by twelve years, dying in 1605, and lived to see her elder son take up the hunt. In the long memory of the Slayerverse, Sampson is remembered as a drover of Garstang, a man of the cattle roads who carried Thorne blood in a quiet vessel and passed it, in due time, to a son who would use it.