The stranger in the inn yard at Wetherby asked for lodging, and asked politely, and stood in the lane outside the gate with the lantern light on his face and would not take one step across the threshold. The ostler thought him shy. The landlord thought him drunk. The manor-court clerk who happened to be crossing the yard thought neither, because he had spent thirteen years learning what a document looks like when it has been altered, and the stranger had the same look: something that had been made to resemble a traveller, with a small error in the writing. Humphrey Proctor, aged twenty-seven, went on standing in the yard long after the stranger had walked away. In that hour in 1556 he became a vampire slayer.
He had been born at Wetherby in 1529, in Yorkshire, in the tanner's house beside the Wharfe, the youngest of three children of Ambrose Proctor, a tanner, and Maud Hebblethwaite, a brewster. His grandparents were Jeremy Proctor, the fell shepherd, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner-slayer called The Wary Bell, and he grew up in the long afterglow of her reputation. His elder brother was Gilbert Proctor, the fuller, born in 1522, and his sister was Bridget Proctor, the spinner, born in 1525. Gilbert had the steadiness and Bridget had the ears; Humphrey was the one who got the mind. He was a lean, pale, dark-browed boy who read everything he was allowed to and several things he was not, and who could not see a locked door without wondering what was behind it.
The family put him to the law. Wetherby was a manor town, and the manor court sat every few weeks in the hall, with a steward, a jury of tenants and a clerk who wrote down everything: admissions, surrenders, fines, quarrels over strayed beasts, boundaries, wills and debts. Humphrey went to the clerk at fourteen to learn the hand, and by twenty-one he was the court's chief scribe. It was dry, careful, poorly paid work, and he loved it. He learned the forms and the formulas, the language by which a man was summoned, distrained, presented, excused or amerced. He learned that a court is a machine for compelling people to be where they are supposed to be, at the time they are supposed to be there, and to say what they are supposed to say. He also learned, as his ancestor Walter Proctor the White Clerk had learned in York a century before, that a clerk who writes everything down hears everything.
The ledger work and the court work fed each other. The White Ledger had been opened by Walter in 1455 and was kept by the Proctors with a clerk's rigour, and Humphrey, who read it as a boy, saw at once that it was a body of evidence. Each entry named a place, a date, a witness and a result, and from the pattern of entries he could deduce things that no single entry said. He found that the vampires of the Wharfe country favoured certain kinds of churchyard, certain kinds of hour and certain kinds of lapsed consecration, and he mapped them. The family called him The Cold Weir, after the stone weir across the Wharfe at Wetherby, where the water goes quiet, pale and very fast over the lip; they meant his manner, level on the surface, relentless beneath it.
The calling in the inn yard shaped his method. He had seen the stranger refuse the threshold and he knew at once what the refusal meant, because his grandmother's papers contained a long and careful note on the matter. That night he did not follow the thing into the dark. He went home and wrote down everything he had seen, the hour, the words, the dress, the gait, the lantern, and he spent three weeks matching it against the court rolls, the register of strangers kept by the constable and the ledger. He found the man's name, a name that had appeared on the roll of a parish forty miles away and then in a burial register, and he followed the trail to a barn on the moor. He went with a matchlock pistol, a short, heavy, newly fashionable weapon with a slow-match and a pan that needed a dry night, and a leather roll of hawthorn stakes, and he did it by the book. The work was done by dawn.
What he did afterwards defined his craft, which his family named Procedural Trapping. It was the application of legal procedure to the hunt, the use of the court's own machinery. A summons could draw a person to a given place at a given hour; a presentment could bind the parish to attend; a distraint could close a barn; a licence could clear a street. Humphrey used all of them. He wrote a bailiff's notice that sent half a village to a harvest meeting on the night a vampire was expected, leaving the lanes empty and the churchyard watched. He arranged a boundary inspection that put a jury of tenants beside a tomb on the very evening its occupant was due to rise, with a justification so dull that nobody questioned it. He believed that a vampire, like a debtor, could be brought to a place and held there by the proper forms. In the Slayerverse he is the clearest example of the detective as bureaucrat, and his notes on the subject were copied for generations.
In 1558 he married Jocosa Ferrand, a weaver whose loom stood in the room above the tannery. She was a sturdy, humorous, deeply practical woman who wove coverlets and cloth for the manor household and who was not remotely afraid of a husband with a stake. She wove a pattern of her own into the lining of his cloak, a twill of grey and white that she said would make him harder to see, and she was right. They had no children, and the marriage was a quiet, companionable one in which both of them worked all day and compared notes at night. Jocosa learned his cases as a weaver learns a pattern, thread by thread, and on more than one occasion she pointed out the flaw. She was never called, but she was a better detective than half the officers of the court.
He spent the middle of his life in the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from about 1549 to 1560, and he saw them from the clerk's table. He wrote down the changes as they arrived, new orders, new oaths, new inventories of church goods, and he noticed that every upheaval left gaps: a churchyard no longer under the priest's eye, a bell removed from a tower, an altar taken from a chapel. He catalogued them. His brother Gilbert copied them into the ledger, and his sister Bridget listened for the rumours that attached to each. Between the three of them the Proctors of Wetherby maintained a better survey of the parish's weak places than the church itself.
The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 tested him differently. The manor court was suspended, and Humphrey was suddenly a clerk without a court, in a town full of armed men and informers. He used the interval to collect, and when the rising collapsed and the commissioners came, he was one of the few men in the parish who could produce a clear record of who had been where. He gave it to nobody. He wrote it into a small book, bound it in leather and kept it in the loft with the ledger, and he did not touch it for years.
He died in 1572 from a blow taken in a churchyard. The injury was not dramatic. He had gone out to a burial ground on the edge of the parish on a damp night, on a matter he had traced through three sets of rolls, and something in the dark struck him hard across the head and the shoulder before he could use the pistol. He finished what he had come to do, walked home and told his wife it was nothing. It was not nothing. Over several days he grew confused and feverish, he could not hold a pen, and he died with Jocosa beside him and Gilbert in the doorway.
Humphrey Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Cold Weir, the manor-court clerk who hunted with a summons instead of a sword. In the Slayerverse he stands for the detective of a slayer family, the vampire slayer who believed that the White Ledger was a body of evidence and that the old quarrel of Towton, the Guest and the Wars of the Roses could be settled only by procedure, patience and a fair reading of the record.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
