Toby Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sable Mantle. Craft: Night Trapping.

The horses were the first to know. In the autumn of 1588, in a coaching stable at Garstang, a string of hired mounts began to scream in the small hours, kicking at their stalls and rolling their eyes at the dark corners of the loft, and the groom who went in to quiet them was found in the morning lying in the straw, cold and pale and without a mark that anyone could account for. The saddler who was mending tack in the next building, a twenty-year-old named Toby Faulkner, was the first to reach the yard. What he did that night made him a vampire slayer, and in the Red Ledger of the Lancastrian house he is set down under the name The Sable Mantle. Toby was born in 1568 at Garstang in Lancashire, a small market town on the road north from Preston, on the edge of the Fylde and the wide, wet plain where the Wyre wanders towards the sea. It was a country of cattle and oats, with Bowland Fells blue on the eastern skyline, and the town's whole reason for existing was the road. Drovers, carriers, packmen and pedlars passed through in a constant stream, and the inns near the market cross lived on their custom. His father, Sampson Faulkner, born in 1539, was one of those drovers, a broad, weathered man who walked Scottish and northern cattle down to the southern markets and returned smelling of the road. His mother, Dionisia Tempest, born in 1542, was a miller's daughter, and she brought to the marriage a knowledge of grain, of water-wheels and of the peculiar sounds a mill makes when something is wrong with it. Toby grew up between the two, the restless father and the settled mother, and he never entirely reconciled them. He was the elder of two sons. His brother Norman Faulkner was born in 1572 and would become a surveyor, and the two boys were as different in temperament as their parents: Norman, tidy and fond of measurement, Toby, moody, capable with his hands and easily bored by anything that could not be held. Their father's long absences left the boys to a household of women and ballad-singers, and the church at Garstang, with its Protestant sermons and its long Sunday afternoons, did little to occupy them. Toby ran errands for the saddlers and the carriers before he was ten, and it was in this way that he found his trade. At fourteen he was bound apprentice to a master saddler in the town, a scrupulous man who had learned his business in Lancaster and thought there were only two virtues, accuracy and patience. Saddlery in that age was skilled leatherwork: the shaping of the tree, the stuffing and stitching of the seat, the cutting of girths, the making of bridles, breastplates and stirrup leathers. A saddle had to fit the horse, the rider and the road, and a bad one lamed a beast in a week. Toby learned to cut leather with a round knife, to sew with two needles and waxed thread, and to stitch a seam so tight that it would hold through a season of Pennine rain. He learned also to read a horse, to see from the way it stood or turned its head whether it was sound, frightened or sick. That habit of reading animals was to serve him better than any weapon. The summer of 1588 was the summer of the Armada, and beacons were lit along the whole Lancashire coast, on the hills above Lancaster and on the tops to the east of Garstang. The county militia mustered, and the saddlers of the district had more orders than they could fill, since every officer wanted his horse fitted and every troop wanted its harness mended. Toby, just out of his indenture, worked through the days and much of the nights. When the threat passed, the town went back to its ordinary business, and it was in the weeks that followed that the stable incident took place. The groom's body was cold in a way that a dead man's is not in a warm loft. The stable-master wanted the matter hushed. Toby, standing in the straw with a lantern, found the horses quiet at last, all facing the same way, towards a low door at the back that led to the hay store. He felt the calling then as a pressure in the chest, a certainty that something on the far side of the door was patient and hungry. He went in with a leather awl, a saddler's stitching tool, and came out with a broken slat from a manger that he had sharpened with his knife. He never gave a full account of the night, except that afterwards he could not stand the smell of hay. He had no mentor. What he had was the ledger, delivered to him a few months later by a Faulkner cousin from Preston who had been told of the event, and a talent for observation. The archetype of the Soldier suited him, practical, physical and unfussy, but his own craft was one nobody had taught him. He called it Night Trapping, and it came from the same instinct that made him a good saddler, an understanding of how animals behave when they are afraid. He would set a hunt by watching the beasts of a district, noting where dogs would not go, which fields the cattle refused, where the geese made noise at dusk, and then he would lay a snare of his own: a cordon of hawthorn stakes, a baited yard, a lantern hooded so that only a door was lit. The vampires he hunted were drawn to the darkness and to the warm animal smell, and he used both against them. His leather skills found new work as well. He made himself a long dark cloak, oiled against the wet and hung with hidden pockets, which the country people took for a saddler's working coat and which gave him his name. His gear was a matchlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, and he was said to have made the holsters himself. The Red Ledger credits him with a long career on the roads between Garstang, Lancaster and Preston, in which he ran down predators that had settled along the coaching route, waiting for travellers. The most famous of these was a pair that had been working the inn yards at the northern end of the town. Toby posed as a carrier and paid for a bed, and sat up in a dark room with the shutters closed while the pair came in after the guests, and he was still at his work when the sun rose. The tally he built through the 1590s and the first years of the next century was steady rather than spectacular, and he was jealous of it in a quiet way. He kept the ledger himself in a hand that was neat, square and small. His father Sampson died in 1593, when Toby was twenty-five, and the household passed largely to the two sons. Toby's relations with his mother remained close: Dionisia lived until 1605, and it was she who kept his workshop lamps trimmed when he was out at night and asked no questions. He never married and had no children, and the ledger's marginal notes remark that the saddle shop was his only wife. He took apprentices, of whom one, the son of a local farmer, went on to a distinguished career in the trade, and he served on the parish vestry through the plague years of the early seventeenth century, when the sickness closed the roads and the winters were long. His relations with the Proctors were distant, a matter of numbers on a page. He respected the White Ledger, which he knew only by report, and he believed the Guest had gone north, which the Faulkners have always taken to be the Yorkshire side of the question. Toby died in 1626, aged fifty-eight, of a fever, in the room over his workshop. His brother Norman, then in his fifties, was with him. The ledger records his last entry, made a week before his death, in which he set down the number of the vampires he had taken and gave the total without comment. In later Slayerverse accounts, the Sable Mantle is remembered as the saddler who taught the Faulkners to listen to horses.