A tanner's yard is the sort of place a man remembers with his nose before his eyes, and Edward Proctor, born in 1517 at Whalley in Lancashire, was known for the rest of his short life by the sour, oaken reek of the pits. He was the elder son of Rafe Proctor, a mason's apprentice who worked on the stone of the great abbey there, and of Rohese Barlow, a fishwife who carried baskets of river trout and salted herring up from the Ribble and cried them at the market cross. His younger brother Thomas Proctor followed him in 1518. Both boys carried the Proctor name of the Yorkist house that kept the White Ledger, though their Lancashire birth placed them oddly among the red-rose families all around, a fact that neighbours never quite forgot.
Whalley in Edward's boyhood was dominated by its abbey, whose cloister and gatehouse rose out of the meadows beside the river, and whose monks owned much of the countryside. The moors above were stone-walled sheep pasture, and the town lived by wool, leather and the abbey's custom. Edward's mother died in 1534, when he was seventeen, and his father Rafe followed in 1536, in the same autumn that the north rose against the king's commissioners. Rafe was known within the family as The Patient Lantern, a slayer who held his ground and let his quarry come to him; Edward later admitted that he had spent two decades under that steady light without understanding what it lit. With both parents gone, the brothers were left with a rented cottage, a set of Rafe's mason's tools and a locked chest which they did not yet dare open.
Edward chose leather rather than stone. He was apprenticed to a tanner at Whalley, and by his early twenties he had a yard of his own on the banks of a beck, with limed pits for the hides, oak bark ground for the tanning liquor and a drying loft in which calf and cowhide hung like a row of sails. It was a foul trade and a well-paid one. A tanner dealt with butchers, cobblers, saddlers and glovers, and knew the movements of every drover on the Lancashire roads. He also learned patience, for good leather took a year in the pit and could not be hurried. In the confusion after the rising and the executions of 1537, when the abbey was surrendered and its lands sold, the yard at least prospered, since the new landlords wanted boots.
His temperament suited the pits. He was a lean man with a narrow, watchful face and red-brown hair that gave him the tinge of a fox, and he spoke slowly, listening more than he talked. People described him as a man who asked one question too many. He would ask a carter about the load, then about the road, then about the man who had loaded it, and by the end of it knew more of a stranger's business than the stranger had meant to give. At the alehouse he sat facing the door. He kept accounts in a fine, cramped hand and went over other men's, delighted when a figure did not agree with its neighbour, and it was from this cast of mind that his later career would grow.
The change came in 1546, when Edward was twenty-nine. Since his brother's death two years earlier he had lived largely alone, and to make ends meet he let a room over the drying loft, in a boarding house that had once been a wool factor's dwelling. One wet evening a lodger arrived, a courteous, pale man in a good travelling cloak, who took the upper chamber and paid for a month in coin. Edward, counting the coins by lamplight, found that they were older than the house. The groats bore the head of a king who had died in the previous century, the silver worn nearly smooth, and among them lay a single coin stamped in a hand he could not place at all. There was no mistaking the smell that lingered on the stair afterwards, a cold stone smell like a cellar opened after long sealing. That night Edward understood that he had been called.
He did not run, and it is the manner of his first encounter for which the family principally remembers him. Instead of confronting the lodger, he wrote down every word the man had spoken since arriving, and then, at breakfast, sat down opposite him and began to ask questions. He asked where the coins came from, where the man had slept before Whalley, whom he had met on the road, who had lent him the cloak. Each answer fitted a little less well with the last, and by the third meal the lodger's civility had thinned. This was the beginning of the craft the White Ledger later called Cross-Examination, the trained capacity to hold a creature in talk until its own lies cut it. Edward drove the stranger step by step into a corner, produced the hawthorn stakes his father's chest had held all those years, and finished the matter in the yard, among the pits, with a matchlock pistol on the table beside him as a precaution. It was his first hunt and it was not clumsy.
From then on he was The Red Harrow, a name that came from the colour of his hair and from the way he seemed to drag a field of evidence clean. He carried a matchlock pistol, hawthorn stakes and a sealed ledger of his own, into which he entered each vampire taken and each lie caught, and which he never let out of his keeping unsealed. The Proctors had begun their tally at York in 1455, and Edward regarded his ledger as a single small page of it. In the twelve months that remained to him he traced four separate creatures through Lancashire villages by their accounts alone, tracking who had paid in what coin, who had missed church, whose cattle had died on the same three nights. He also noticed, uncomfortably, that the Faulkner families in the county appeared to be working the same trails, and he spent more than one night comparing his list with rumours of theirs. The rivalry between the ledgers was a contest of entries, not of blows, and he took his satisfaction in being first to the line.
In the spring of 1547, the old king dying and the country unsettled by the change of reign, he followed one last trail to a chapel yard on the moor above Whalley. The creature had been drawing sheep-farmers into private conversation in the churchyard after evensong, and Edward went to meet it alone, intending to question rather than strike. He was struck instead: a single blow, from behind, taken among the gravestones. He died there in 1547, aged thirty, of the injury, and his sealed ledger was found in the pocket of his coat with the last entry unfinished. It lay in the mud of the churchyard, and a farmer who found the body carried both back to the tannery.
He never married and left no children. What survived him was a yard, a set of tanner's tools and a ledger that his cousins of the Proctor line copied out in York with a mixture of reverence and irritation at the unfinished line. His brother Thomas Proctor had already fallen in the same manner, in a churchyard, three years before him, and the family drew its own conclusions about the habit of walking alone into such places. A vampire slayer of one year's standing and a tanner of many, descended, like all of his kind, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, Edward is remembered by the Proctor archivists as a careful interrogator and a poor judge of his own safety. Slayerverse readers know him as the tanner who learned that a lie has a smell of its own, and that the truth, once asked for, takes its time.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
