Harry Tempest

Broker slayer from a local family, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Flint Sentinel. Craft: Witness Reading.

Harry Tempest taught boys to conjugate Latin verbs in the day and hunted things that had once been men at night, and by every account he was more patient with the second class of pupil than the first. He was born in 1651 in Pontefract, Yorkshire, under the ruined bulk of the castle that Parliament had ordered pulled down only three years earlier, and the stone of the old fortress was carried away for years afterward to build barns and garden walls. The town was known for its liquorice fields, its market and its scars, having endured three sieges in the civil wars. Harry grew up in a place where children played in a landscape of tumbled masonry and learned early that buildings, like men, could be broken. No record survives of his parents, and the family memory says only that he came up by his own effort and was unaffiliated with any of the slayer houses. Learning was his way upward. He attended the grammar school in the town, absorbed Latin and a little Greek, and went on to serve as an usher, an under-teacher, before taking a school of his own. A schoolmaster in the Restoration was a precarious figure, licensed by the bishop, required to swear conformity to the Church of England, and paid a small stipend supplemented by fees from the parents. Harry took the oaths, taught the boys in a bare, cold room with a birch on the wall, and gained a reputation as a stern but fair master, famous for never striking a boy in anger. He had a lean, watchful face, a stoop from bending over slates, and a habit of pausing before he answered a question, so that his pupils learned to wait for him. It was this pause, more than any learning, that his later colleagues admired. In 1673 he married Lettice Hutton Proctor, a weaver, born in 1654 and therefore nineteen to his twenty-two. She was the daughter of a York scribe and a dressmaker, and the younger sister of Roland Proctor, a clerk who was already one of the White Ledger's more careful hands, and of Susannah Proctor, a slayer in her own right. Harry met her through the wool trade, since the school's benefactor was a clothier who bought her cloth, and the courtship was carried on in the plain manner of the time, by visits on holy days and a good deal of quiet walking. They married in the parish church and set up house near the school, where Lettice kept a loom in the front room, and the sound of the shuttle became part of the household's daily weather. Their only child, Matilda Proctor Tempest, was born in 1676. He entered the Proctor circle as an in-law and, for seven years, knew nothing of what the circle did. His wife, discreet by upbringing, kept the White Ledger business away from the schoolhouse, and Roland was careful of a brother-in-law who had sworn an oath to the bishop. Then in 1680 the calling came for Harry himself, and the schoolmaster became a vampire slayer. He was returning on a lonely road one evening from a neighbouring parish where he had gone to examine a boy for the grammar school, when a coach came up behind him at a fast trot. It was a good coach, well-sprung and painted dark, and it had a driver on the box and no passengers inside. The driver did not look down. The horses were foaming and completely silent. Harry stepped aside to let it pass, and as it went by he found that he could read the whole inside of it as though it were a page held to the light: the emptiness, the fine dust on the seats, the absence of any smell of horse or leather. Something in him turned, and he knew. He went to Roland with the story, and Roland, after a long moment, brought out a key. Harry took the alias The Flint Sentinel, chosen by his brother-in-law for his stillness and the way he stood watch, and his craft was Witness Reading, an ability more unusual than the family's usual talents. It allowed him to take a witness's account, however confused or frightened, and feel the shape of what had actually been seen beneath it, in the way a good teacher can hear in a boy's stumbling recitation which words he understands and which he has merely memorised. In practice this meant that he could interview the terrified survivor of an attack and separate what they had seen from what they had been told to see. He carried a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, hidden in the schoolroom press behind the spare slates, and the Broker in him, as the family classed such roles, traded information between hunters and the frightened folk of the villages, so that both trusted him. For thirteen years he lived a double life without either half of it suffering. The boys were taught, the fees collected, the quarterly examinations held. At night, or at weekends when Lettice covered for him with a story about visits to a sick cousin, he rode out to the towns along the coaching roads and sat in kitchens taking accounts. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 disturbed his position at the school, because the oaths of allegiance were again in question, and for a season it looked as though schoolmasters who would not swear the new form might be turned out; Harry swore, privately calculating that the county's vampires paid no heed to either king. He rose in the White Ledger as a man whose accounts of an incident were always precise, and Lettice, who had been drawn into the secret willingly, sometimes wrote out his entries for him in her better hand. He died in 1693 of wounds taken in a cellar hunt, aged 42. It was an ordinary hunt of the kind he had done many times: a vampire sheltering in the cellar of a burnt farmhouse near a market town, three slayers going down the steps with lanterns. In the dark the creature broke past the first man and struck Harry in the chest and side before the others brought it down. He lived four days, long enough to tell his wife what to do with the school, and to say goodbye to his daughter, who was seventeen. Lettice lived until 1717, and kept his pistol. Matilda, who lived until 1749, never took up the stakes but preserved the school's books and her father's account of each hunt, and it is from her copies that the Proctor family knows how precisely he wrote. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as a rare figure, an in-law who became a full member of the White Ledger's roll, and his stillness, his pauses and his readiness to listen became, in later Proctor teaching, a kind of ideal.