Ezekiel Lister

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The Ackworth parish register for the year 1700 records the baptism of a boy called Ezekiel Lister in a clerk's cramped hand, and the ink has faded to the colour of weak tea. He was born that year in Ackworth, Yorkshire, a village of stone cottages strung along the high ground south of Pontefract, and he lived his whole life within a day's walk of the font where he was christened. He never married and he left no children. What he left instead was a farm kept in better order than any of his neighbours' holdings, a reputation for quiet reliability among the Proctor kin of the West Riding, and a long silence in the family papers that later writers of the White Ledger have had to fill from the records of the people around him. His father was Joseph Proctor Lister, born in 1673, a smith who worked a forge at the end of the village street and who died in 1750. The middle name was the family's way of remembering where the blood came from: the Listers were Proctors on the distaff side, descended from Robert Proctor and so from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, whose marriage at York in January 1486 had joined the two houses. In the Yorkshire way, the surname had drifted away from the ledger while the obligation had not. His mother was Heather Thorne, born in 1668, a dressmaker by trade, and the house of Thorne, Northumbrian border reivers turned hill hunters, had sent her south with a needle in one hand and a good deal else in the other. The women of that house did not choose their aliases lightly. Heather was known in the trade as The Iron Crook, a name that came from the shepherd's crook she carried on the moors, its head bound with iron bands, and she died in 1740. She was a slayer, and the household in which Ezekiel grew up ran on the assumption that a mother might be called out at dusk and come home at dawn with mud to her knees and a pattern of hems still to finish. Ezekiel had one sibling, an elder brother named Richard Lister, born in 1699, who was also a slayer. The two boys could hardly have been more different. Richard was the one who went out, and Ezekiel was the one who stayed, and the family accepted the arrangement without comment. A slayer's work needs a fixed point behind it: somebody to know where the hunter has gone, to keep a lamp trimmed, to hold the accounts and to have a horse fed and shod when it is wanted. Ezekiel became that fixed point. He was not a hunter, and the calling never came to him, but the White Ledger had always depended on people who would rather count than kill, and he counted well. He took up farming when he was still a young man, and his land lay on the clay and limestone slopes above the Went valley, where the soil grew wheat and beans and stood up to a wet autumn better than most. Farming in the West Riding in those decades was a matter of small fields, drystone walls and the long rhythm of the market calendar. Ezekiel carted his grain to Wakefield and Pontefract, sold cheese and wool to the dealers who worked the coaching roads, and paid his tithes and his rates on the day they fell due. Neighbours remembered him as a spare, sun-weathered man who wore the same brown coat for a decade, kept his hedges laid and his gates on their hinges, and never once, in thirty years of Michaelmas settlements, left a debt open. Word of that got around, and it mattered, because a slayer's family depends on trust in ways no ledger can measure. Two great alarms of his lifetime came up the road from the north. In 1715 Ezekiel was fifteen years old when the first Jacobite rising sent rumour and recruiting parties through the county, and old men at the inn spoke of Preston and the surrender there. The second rising, in the autumn and winter of 1745, found him a man of forty-five, and this time armies did march through Yorkshire, or so the countryside believed; the militia was called, the gentry looked to their plate, and the price of oats went up in a week. In both alarms his brother and mother were kept busy, for disorder has always been a good cover for the things the ledgers watch, and a district emptied of its young men by a rebellion or by a levy is easier prey than a quiet one. Ezekiel's part was to shelter, feed and, when necessary, lie. He told a recruiting sergeant that his farmhand had gone to Leeds, and it was true, and he told a curious excise man that the light in the barn was a sick cow, and that was true, too, after a fashion. In those years, too, he watched the mills begin to draw people off the land, as small cloth and spinning works grew up along the rivers and the market towns swelled with families who had given up on the fields. It did not much move Ezekiel, who thought a farm was a farm, but it did trouble the elders of the family. A village that emptied could no longer keep watch on itself, and a town that filled with strangers made a poor place for the slow work of noticing what was wrong. He is remembered in the ledgers less for what he did than for what he wrote, since the White Ledger of those years contains a number of entries that were copied fair from Ezekiel's hand. He kept a farm day-book in a calfskin cover, in which sales of wheat and the weather were entered on the left and, on the right, in a cipher of his own devising, the movements of his brother and mother. After each of the Listers' hunts he would sit at the kitchen table and note the date, the place and the tally. When Richard's account and his mother's disagreed, it was Ezekiel who found out why. His relationship with the rival house was one of steady courtesy. The Faulkner line had gone to the colonies long since, and in his time the Yorkshire Proctors saw the rivalry as a matter of letters and long memory rather than anything close at hand. Still, he knew the story of the Guest, the vampire who slipped away at Towton in 1461, and he knew that the Wars of the Roses had never truly ended for his family, only changed shape. A letter came now and then over the sea in a Faulkner hand, all politeness and thinly veiled competition, and Ezekiel answered them with a farmer's dry good manners. He was known to say, in his last years, that the ledgers did not need heroes so much as neighbours, and that a county well farmed was already half defended. Heather died in 1740, and his father Joseph ten years afterward, in 1750, and after that the house at Ackworth was quiet. Richard was mostly away, and Ezekiel kept the place going in the way of an unmarried man, with a housekeeper, a lad, and the tolerable loneliness of a person whose whole family lives in the road. He died in 1763, aged 63, of childbed. The word is strange in that place and it has puzzled every reader since; the register gives it plainly, and the family tradition, which tries to make sense of it, says that he sat up through a long winter's night nursing the lying-in of a neighbouring farm wife when no midwife could be got through the snow, and took the fever the child-bed carried, though the doctors called the cause by the old name. Whatever the truth, he was buried in the churchyard at Ackworth, and the neighbours who followed him were farmers, drovers and carters, with three or four quiet people from outside the parish whom nobody could account for. The White Ledger honours him in a line of his own, and later Proctors have taken him as a model of what the ordinary Slayerverse looked like in its long stretches between dramatic years: a farm, a table, a lamp left burning, and a person who kept the books honest when the hunters were away.