The body in the ditch at Brompton was found on a Monday morning, buried again on Tuesday, and found in the same ditch on Wednesday, and by the time it turned up on Thursday the night watch of Richmond had begun to argue about whether the thing was a corpse at all. It was 1486, and a nineteen-year-old spinner called Agnes Barlow, who had spent three days listening to the watchmen grumble over their ale in her aunt's kitchen, suggested that they were asking the wrong question. A corpse that rose and returned was not a matter for the parish constable. She asked to see the ditch. What she found there, in the wet clay beneath the hawthorn, was the beginning of her life as a vampire slayer.
She had been born in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1467, in a town that still lived in the shadow of its own castle. The Norman keep stood on its crag above the River Swale, the market place below was a great cobbled square lined with gabled houses, and the abbey of St Mary at York, whose monks held the church, drew a steady trade of pilgrims and traders. Wool from the dales came down to Richmond to be spun, and the spinners, mostly women, worked in cottages and kitchens with a distaff under the arm and a spindle whirling at the hip, in the manner of their grandmothers; the great wheel had begun to arrive, and the better-off households owned one. Agnes's parents were small people who took in wool, and the family ledgers do not give their names. She was raised, in the family's phrase, on thread.
Spinning is an underrated training for a detective. It is repetition, and attention, and a habit of noticing the tiny irregularities in a thread that will become visible only when it is woven. Agnes could spin an even yarn from the worst fleece in the North Riding, and she could also tell, from a stranger's dropped remark or a stain on a sleeve, what he had been doing the night before. She was a small, sharp-faced girl with a long braid, ink on her fingers from the tally-sticks she kept for her aunt's accounts, and a way of looking at people as though comparing them with a description. She was blunt and often tactless, and quite unable to leave a puzzle alone. She read what she could, mostly the psalter and the almanac, and she had a bright, retentive memory for what was said in her hearing.
The calling came in the winter of 1486, when the watchmen brought the ditch's body to her attention. It was already the fourth night, and what she did that night established her method. She did not charge at it. She sat with the watchmen, learned the times, the ditch, the dead man's name and the local gossip about him, and asked the priest which of his parishioners had been buried and unshriven. She marked the clay with a pattern of string and sticks, and on the fourth night, with a borrowed bow and a handful of hawthorn stakes cut from the hedge above, she waited on a stone wall. When the corpse rose she was not surprised. She was, as she said afterwards, extremely afraid, and entirely certain of what she should do. Two stakes and a great deal of luck finished the business. She was called, and no mentor came for her. She had to work the rest out by herself.
Her craft, when it formed, was a method she named Seal and Sanction. It was, at heart, the detective's discipline of proof: no hunt without a written finding, no finding without a witness, and no tally accepted until it was sealed. She carried a ledger of her own, bound in leather and closed with a wax seal, and in it she wrote the facts of every case as she found them, the times, names, wounds, and the words of any witness, before she acted. The seal was the point. Once a finding was made and sealed, it could not be altered by pride or by the pressure of a family's reputation. It is the origin of the tradition among the White Ledger's hunters that a tally must be witnessed, and it made her, in Yorkshire, a person whose word was worth more than most men's oaths. Her alias, The Wary Bell, came from her habit of sounding a small brass bell on her belt before entering any house, so that the household would know a hunter was coming and no one would be startled into folly. Her gear was a yew bow, blackthorn stakes and the sealed ledger.
She met Jeremy Proctor at a wool fair in 1487. He was a shepherd from the fells above Wetherby, quiet, lean and weather-beaten, who had brought a fleece to sell and had stayed to watch her deal with a dishonest weigher. They married in 1488, when she was twenty-one and he twenty-three. She told him of her calling before the wedding; he listened, nodded, and said that he had never been able to keep the wolves off a flock without knowing what was in the dark. He was the son of Walter Proctor, the White Clerk, and it was said that the family's ledger-keepers looked at the sealed book on her belt and saw at once why Jeremy had married a woman who could not be argued out of an answer. They lived in a stone cottage on the fell, and their children were John Proctor, born 1491, who became a slayer like his mother, and Heloise Proctor, born 1492, who did not.
She worked from the cottage across the dale and the moors, using Jeremy's knowledge of the hills and her own of the towns. The marsh was her country. Wetherby lay near low wet ground along the Wharfe, and the old flooded meadows out toward the Vale of York were a favourite refuge of things that liked to lie hidden. She would go out for a night, sometimes two, and come back with her skirts wet to the knee, her ledger written in a small cramped hand, and a stern satisfaction. Her best-known case, in 1499, was the matter of the Bramham drovers: four men gone in a season, and every parish blaming its neighbours. It was Agnes who lined up the dates, walked the line of the missing, and found the pattern; she took the vampire by the reed-beds in a hard frost. The White Ledger entry for that year is written in her own hand and runs to three pages, the longest single entry of its age.
Her relations with the Faulkner hunters were formal and courteous. She never forgot that her husband's sister Isabel had married a Faulkner, and she kept a professional eye on the Lancastrian tallies. When a Red Ledger entry crossed the Yorkshire line, she would write to Thomas Faulkner in the same careful hand, asking him to confirm it. He did, and she countersigned it. It was the sort of thing later generations remembered as a kind of good manners: two sides that trusted the seal more than each other. The matter of the Guest, of Towton, was the one thing she refused to certify for either house, saying that a witness who could not be found could not be sealed.
In 1513, the year of Flodden, when the northern parishes gave up their men to the muster, she was forty-six and busy, watching the empty farms for what might come into them. The war had left a spoiled autumn. She grew older, the ledger grew fatter, and her son John began to carry her bow. In 1520, after a long night on the marsh, she came home wet through, sat by the fire, and did not get up in the morning. She was fifty-three. Jeremy laid the sealed ledger on her breast, and John, a slayer of twenty-nine, took it out again at the graveside, because she would have wanted it to be used.
She remains, in the Slayerverse, the standard by which a tally is judged, and the Wary Bell rings on in the White Ledger's rule that nothing counts until it is sealed.
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