Amos Proctor Lister

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Ash Weir. Craft: Cross-Examination.

The hounds came home first. That was how Amos Proctor Lister told the story of his calling, in the few years he told it at all: a hunt in the autumn of 1760, a long afternoon of horns and hedges, and then, in the fields at the end of the day, the pack streaming back across the stubble without the huntsman who had ridden out behind them. Amos was twenty-one. He was a wheelwright's journeyman and future vampire slayer from Philadelphia who had gone out to the country to mend a cart wheel and had stayed to watch the meet. Before the sun was down he had walked into the wood, found what the hounds had refused to touch, and learned what he was going to be for the next half century. He died in 1810, aged seventy-one, of nothing more dramatic than old age, which for a Proctor slayer of the Pennsylvania line was itself a small distinction. He was born in 1739 in Philadelphia, then the largest and busiest town in British America, a grid of brick houses and Quaker courtesy laid out between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Ships from Bristol, Cork and the West Indies crowded the wharves along Front Street, and the markets on High Street sold everything from Lancaster County butter to Madeira wine. Bells, wagons and shipwrights' mallets made a permanent noise. The city was tolerant by the standards of its century, orderly, prosperous and a little smug, and it bred a particular kind of young man: numerate, litigious, cautious with money and curious about everything. Amos was that kind of young man from his earliest years. His father, Amos Lister, born in 1715, was a riverboat pilot who took shallops and flats up and down the Delaware and its tributaries, and who knew the tide tables of the river the way a parson knows his psalter. His mother, Susanna Tipton, born in 1712, was a milliner with a small shop off Second Street, where she trimmed hats for merchants' wives and heard a good deal of the town's talk over the counter. Amos was their only child, and the ledger records no brother or sister. He was raised in a house of two trades, one that looked outward to the river and one that looked inward to the parlour, and he took something from each: his father's sense of currents and his mother's sense of what people say when they think no one is listening. Susanna died in 1758, when he was nineteen, and her son was already bound to a wheelwright by then. Amos Lister lived on until 1788, dying at seventy-three, long enough to see his son's name in the White Ledger. The apprenticeship was a good one. A wheelwright in the eighteenth century built and mended the wheels, axle-trees and bodies of carts, wagons and coaches, and the trade demanded exact carpentry, a smith's understanding of tyres and a memory for the timber. Ash for the felloes, elm for the naves, oak for the spokes: he learned them by their smell. He learned too that a wheel is a matter of tension and balance, of forces held against each other, and the idea stayed with him. When his hunting years came he used to say that a case was built like a wheel, and that if one spoke was wrong the whole thing would run out of true. The alias The Ash Weir came from the trade and from his habit of damming up a question until the truth backed up behind it. His calling was not the usual inheritance of the Proctor line. No parent of his was a slayer, and no mentor was waiting for him. The ledger notes that Amos came to the work alone, with the White Ledger's knowledge reaching him only later, through cousins in the Virginia valley and a Quaker farmer near Germantown who had kept a Proctor hunting-book for two generations without ever opening it to use. Amos taught himself, from that book and from his own mistakes. He cast his own silver shot and learned to load a long rifle in the dark. He kept careful notes on the ground, the hours and the habits of what he hunted, and by his third year he was making them stand up like legal briefs. What made him distinctive was the way he used the town. The ledgers classify him as a Broker, a hunter who works through the exchange of information, favours and pressure rather than through the chase. Philadelphia was a place where a wheelwright met carters, ship's carpenters, tavernkeepers, magistrates' clerks and river pilots every day, and Amos knew them all. When a creature was feeding on the outlying farms, he could find out within a week who had lost cattle, who had buried a child and whose lodger kept odd hours. He traded these scraps carefully, and, following the method the ledger names Cross-Examination, he questioned witnesses so gently and so persistently that they came away believing they had volunteered everything. He carried a long rifle and silver-cast shot, and used them at the end of the inquiry rather than at the beginning. The war with France on the frontier gave him plenty of employment. The Pennsylvania borderlands were raided and burnt through the late 1750s and early 1760s, and the fugitives who poured into the city carried stories that were part fear and part fact. He sorted them. Two of the entries credited to him in the White Ledger in the years after Pontiac's rising turn out to be creatures that had followed a column of refugees down from the Susquehanna country and settled in the poorhouse district of the city, and Amos closed both cases in a matter of weeks, one in a tannery cellar and one in a shuttered warehouse on the river. He was not a fighter by temperament. His habit was to arrive late and quiet with everything settled. He never married and left no children. He said once that a wheelwright was married already, to a wheel, and the joke was as much as anyone got out of him. His household was his shop in a lane off Arch Street, where he took apprentices, kept a cat and slept above the workbench, and where the family's ledger correspondence was stored in a cedar box under the stairs. During the Revolution he continued to work, repairing gun carriages and wagons for the Continental army while Philadelphia changed hands, and he is said to have identified a British quartermaster's clerk as a feeder during the occupation of the winter of 1777, though the ledger does not name the man. His feelings about the Faulkners were those of most Proctors of his time: cool, correct and quietly competitive. He kept the White Ledger's copy of the Red Ledger's tallies in his cedar box and marked in the margin every entry he thought overstated. He held that the Guest of Towton, the vampire who escaped in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, was proof that both houses had once counted too soon. Amos died in 1810, in his own bed, worn out at seventy-one after a last quiet decade with his tools and his books. He left the rifle and the cedar box to the Pennsylvania cousins. In the tradition of the Slayerverse he is remembered as the Proctor who broke cases as a wheelwright builds wheels, patiently and to a true line.