Ambrose Proctor smelled of oak bark, and his family said they could find him in the dark by it. He was born in 1495 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, the third child of Jeremy Proctor, the shepherd of the fells above the town, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner who was also, though Ambrose was not told it for many years, a vampire slayer called The Wary Bell. His elder brother John Proctor and his elder sister Heloise Proctor were already in the house when he arrived; his younger sister Alice Proctor followed in 1499 and his younger brother Nicholas Proctor in 1502. It was a stone cottage on the edge of the fell, with a byre, a croft and a wheel in the corner, and the children grew up in it as lambs grow up in a pen, underfoot and in each other's way.
Where his brother John took to the hills and his mother's secrets, Ambrose took to the river. The Wharfe ran under the stone bridge at Wetherby, and along its bank, downwind of the town by common consent, stood the tanyards. He was drawn to them at nine, to the astonishment of his father, who had expected another shepherd. There was something honest to him in a trade that took a raw hide and turned it, by patience alone, into something that would last. He was apprenticed at twelve to a tanner of the town, an unnamed, irritable, enormously competent man, and spent seven years among the lime pits, the bark vats and the long drying lofts. He learned the whole slow business: the soaking, the scraping of the hair from the hide on a beam, the weeks in lime and the months in bark liquor, the careful layering of skin and oak in the pit, the lifting of a leather that had been a year in the making and was ready, at last, to be cut.
It was not a trade for the squeamish and he was not squeamish. He was a heavy, cheerful, round-shouldered man, forever in an apron that no washing could save, with forearms stained brown to the elbow and a laugh that carried across the yard. He talked to the hides, as his father talked to the dogs. He had a good eye for a skin and a better one for a customer, and when he set up on his own account at the river's edge in Wetherby, with a tanyard, a small shop and a back room, the cobblers and saddlers of three parishes learned that his leather held its shape in the wet. The town forgave him the smell because it needed him.
In 1513, the year of the Flodden campaign, when men from every northern parish went north to the muster, Ambrose was eighteen and finishing his apprenticeship. The army needed boots, belts, jerkins and saddle-straps in numbers that no tanner could meet, and he spent the summer and autumn working until the pits ran dry. He did not march. His master said that a boy who could turn out two hundred pairs of straps in a fortnight was worth more at the beam than in the line. Ambrose accepted the verdict with a gladness he was ashamed of, and spent the rest of his life making belts and boots for men who had.
He learned about the White Ledger from John, in 1520, the year their mother died. Agnes had come home wet through from a night on the marsh and did not rise from her chair. At the funeral John laid the sealed book on the table and told his brothers and sisters, in as few words as he could manage, what the family was. Ambrose heard him out, washed his hands slowly, and said that he supposed it explained the bell. He did not take up a bow. He understood himself, in the way of a plain man, to be the member of the slayer family who stayed at the bench and kept the roof up, and he saw nothing shameful in the arrangement. A hunter who needed a belt mended at midnight or a boot resoled between watches knew where to knock. In the back room of the tanyard there was a hook where a stake-case might hang for a night, and no questions asked.
That same year he married Maud Hebblethwaite, a brewster from Tadcaster, whom he had met at a fair when she was selling ale and he was buying a drink he did not need. She was a large-voiced, quick-handed woman who ran a brewhouse of her own and looked at the tanyard on her wedding day as a general looks at the ground he has been given. They kept the tanyard and the brewing together for forty years. Their children were Gilbert Proctor, born in 1522; Bridget Proctor, born in 1525; and Humphrey Proctor, born in 1529, who became a slayer and was the only one of the three to carry the family's old work out into the dark. Ambrose raised them as he raised leather: slowly, without hurry, and with an eye for what would hold. He never told Humphrey what to do about his calling. He gave him a good strong pair of boots, and said that the boots, at least, would not let him down.
The risings of 1536 and 1537 came through the district like a flood. After the monasteries were dissolved, the north was full of marching men and frightened ones, and the road at Wetherby carried both. The tanyard was in an awkward place: it supplied leather to anyone with coin and had no wish to know their politics. Ambrose kept his doors open and his counsel to himself. When a party of armed men came to the yard and demanded all the hides he had in stock, he said that they could have the hides, but they would not like what the hides were worth until they had been a year in the pit, and in the end they took only what they could pay for. He was shaken by the visit, and that night he took down the family copy of the White Ledger and read the first page, for the first time, through to the end. It did him some good. The rivalry with the Faulkners and the matter of the Guest at Towton, in the old Wars of the Roses, seemed small and ancient beside the present trouble, and he found it a comfort that the family had kept its tallies through worse.
The long years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from 1549 to 1560, wore on him less than on others. The church changed its mind about candles, and then about the Mass, and then again, and the parish at Wetherby sat through each version in the same pews. Ambrose paid his tithe to whichever vicar presented himself, and filled the back room with the sort of leather that nobody asked about. By then he was in his fifties, grey in the beard and slower on the lime-pit steps, with Gilbert beside him at the beam and Maud's brewhouse prospering beyond anything he had foreseen. His brother Nicholas died in 1555, and he followed the coffin on foot with a face like a shut gate.
His own end was slow. In his sixties, the strength began to drain from him, and he lost weight until the heavy cheerful man was a stooped one, his hands still stained, his appetite gone. The wasting illness, as the town called it, had no remedy that the apothecary could supply, and Ambrose, who had spent his life watching things change slowly in the dark, understood exactly what was happening. He died in 1561, in his own bed above the tanyard, at the age of sixty-six, with the bark smell still in the room. Maud sat with him through the last night and then, according to family memory, went down at dawn and opened the brewhouse because the morning ale had to be made.
Ambrose Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the tanner who stayed at the bench, and as the man who proved that a slayer family needs hands as well as hunters. No tally stands to his name in the White Ledger, but the hunters of three generations went about in boots that he had made or taught others to make, and that is a form of entry too. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patient, unglamorous craft that holds the line beneath the legend: the slow cure, the steady hand, and the back room where no question is asked.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
