Skipton, where Dennis Nowell was born in 1545, sat at the meeting of the Craven dales and the high Pennine country, a stone town with a castle at the head of its market street and a canal of grey weather always coming down from the moors. Its fairs were among the largest in the north, and every autumn the roads into it filled with black cattle, Scottish galloways and small shaggy Craven sheep, herded by men who had walked for days. A boy growing up there could not avoid the drovers. They drank in the town's alehouses, slept in barns, quarrelled at the market cross and vanished again down the road. Dennis, from about the age of ten, decided he wanted to be one of them.
His family, of whom nothing is set down beyond the fact of their poverty, apparently had no objection. A drover's life was hard but honest, and it required almost no capital. A boy began as a runner, carrying messages and turning stray beasts back toward the herd, and gradually became a hand trusted with a part of the drove. Dennis was a lean, weathered lad with a lopsided grin and a voice that carried across a valley, and he had the essential gift of the trade, an instinct for animals. He could tell when a bullock was about to bolt, when a herd would panic at a river, when a storm would turn the drove-road into a bog. He learned the old green roads that ran across the fells, avoiding the tolls and the enclosed lands of the gentry, and he learned which alehouses gave a drover a bed for his dog.
A drover's year followed the great fairs. The cattle were bought in the spring on the northern pastures and in Scotland, fattened on Craven grass through the summer, then driven in autumn to the markets of the south, to Northampton, to Smithfield, to the graziers of Norfolk and Essex, where they would be finished for the city's tables. Each drove might be three hundred beasts and take three weeks. The men slept out under blankets, ate oatcake and hard cheese, forded rivers by known shallows and paid the toll-keepers in coin and gossip. It was a life of constant movement and constant news, and Dennis carried the news with him, as every drover did, from town to town, tale for tale.
He met Anne Proctor in Leeds, on the Briggate, where she sold spun wool and he had brought a herd to the market. She was four years his senior, a spinner of some reputation, with a quick tongue and a level eye, and he was nineteen. They married in 1564, and Dennis, who had been sleeping in barns for nine years, found himself in a house with a chimney, a pot and a wheel humming in the corner. He was away for weeks at a stretch, but when he returned it was to a hearth and a woman who wanted to hear about every mile of the road. She gave him, in return, news of the town and the trade, and they made a lasting partnership out of their opposite temperaments.
Two daughters were born to them in Leeds. Odelina Proctor came in 1567 and Mary Proctor in 1568, both taking the Proctor name from their mother's side, a custom Dennis accepted with the easy tolerance of a man who spent most of his life on the road. He was a devoted, incompetent father in the sense that he was often absent and always forgiven. He returned with ribbons and news from Northampton, with an orange once, wrapped in a cloth, which the girls carved up with reverence. He taught them the drover's rules: never run a herd, always know the ground, leave no gate open, and watch the sky. Mary in particular listened to him with unusual attention.
The White Ledger came to him through marriage, and he was a natural recruit. Drovers walked the lonely roads and the high passes at night, camped in places where no honest man would stay long and heard things in the dark. Dennis had, by his own account, seen more than one thing he could not explain, a figure that watched the herd from a distant ridge and vanished when the dogs turned, a barn where the beasts would not enter. When Anne, once she trusted him with the Proctor family business, told him what these might have been, he took it with the fatalism of his trade. From then on he carried reports, of stock found drained, of strangers who avoided the sun, of certain inns to shun. His notes reached the Yorkist ledger-keepers via his wife and, later, his daughter. The White Ledger, begun in the Wars of the Roses by Walter Proctor, was rarely so well informed about the drove-roads.
Anne's death in 1582 was the great blow. She was thrown from a horse on the Leeds road on her way to meet him at a fair, and Dennis, thirty-seven, arrived to find his wife already buried. He carried that guilt without explanation to his own grave. He did not remarry, and he did not stop droving; the road was the only life he knew. But he brought his daughters into his confidence more than ever, and Mary, in particular, began to travel with him for stretches, learning the fells by night. When she grew into her calling as a vampire slayer, her father's knowledge of the drove-roads was the map she worked from.
The years that followed were, on the surface, the same seasons of the same trade. He was forty-three in the Armada summer of 1588, when beacons were lit along the northern hills and the drovers found themselves stopped by musters and constables in every parish; he complained bitterly of the delay and made up the time by night. He lived through the harsh winters and rising prices of the 1590s, through the death of the old queen, through the plague that followed, and into King James's first years, still walking the roads at an age when most of his contemporaries were long in the churchyard. He grew bent and grey and wore a coat so patched that his grandchildren said it was more thread than cloth.
He died in 1606, aged sixty-one, in an accident on the fells. The details are thin. He was found at the foot of a crag after a night of driving rain, apparently having slipped on wet stone while leading his beasts down off the tops, and the herd stood around him until morning. He was buried at Leeds beside Anne. His daughter Odelina lived until 1630 and Mary until 1629.
The ledgers record Dennis Nowell as a "road warden," a title conferred by the family after his death. Within the Slayerverse he stands as the drover who carried warnings along the old green roads and ended, as he had begun, with the weather on his face and a herd at his heels.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
