The tavern that Ivo Wilberforce kept stood a short walk from the harbour in Whitby, where the tide ran in and out of the Esk under a swing of gulls and the smell of kippering smoke lay over the town like a lid. He was born there in 1618, into a port that lived by alum, herring and coal ships, and he lived long enough to grow old behind a bar in the Yorkshire hills. He was not a slayer and not born to the families, yet he married into the Proctor line and spent thirty years serving them, without ever quite saying so, over a counter of scarred oak.
Nothing is recorded of his parents, and Ivo himself was in the habit of saying that he had been born on the quay and raised by the tide. What is known is that he began as a pot-boy at a Whitby inn, hauling barrels, scouring pewter and learning to keep a temper level while sailors argued. Whitby in the 1620s and 1630s was a busy, cramped town of red-tiled roofs and steep yards, its abbey a broken shell above the east cliff, its shipyards ringing with adzes. The town's fortunes hung on the collier brigs that ran down the coast to London, and the fishwives who carried baskets up the ninety-nine steps to the church. The winters were cruel, with the sea-fret rolling in for days and the wind cutting through every wall. Ivo grew up sharp-eyed, broad and slow-spoken, and by his early twenties had saved enough to lease a small alehouse of his own.
The civil wars unsettled that career. Yorkshire was divided, with the coast leaning to Parliament and much of the gentry inland to the king, and Whitby saw ships requisitioned and men pressed. Ivo, whose alehouse had lost most of its custom, closed up and travelled south and inland to find work. He was in his late twenties when he came to a coaching inn on one of the roads through the Yorkshire dales and took a post as tapster. It was there, in 1645, that he married Rosamund Proctor, born in 1623, a housekeeper at the inn who had grown up on the wrong side of a rather large family. Her mother had been Katherine Proctor, of the York clerks' line, and her father a Thorne; Rosamund carried the Proctor name in the White Ledger's reckoning, and was known at the inn as a woman who never lost a key.
The match surprised her relatives. Ivo had no house and no name of consequence, and although the Proctors were courteous to him they let him understand, over a dinner of cold mutton, that they were a family with obligations. Rosamund told him what they were on the night before the wedding, while they walked the yard, and Ivo, who had spent his youth among sailors and knew a tale about creatures that came in on the tide, took it with less surprise than she had feared. He said that he had once seen a ship come into Whitby with everyone on board asleep and that he had never been able to explain it. From that night he stood among the family as an ally rather than a member.
Their son Ross Proctor was born in 1646, and he would grow up to be a vampire slayer in his own right, though that belongs to his own story. Ivo's part was to give the boy a childhood in which the extraordinary could be assumed. The tavern the couple came to keep, a stone inn on a coaching road with a stable yard, a low taproom hung with hams and a private room above the porch, became a meeting place for the White Ledger's people. Riders and carriers traded news across its tables, the family's cousins slept in its upper rooms, and every stranger who came asking after a bed was assessed by Ivo before he was asked his name. He kept a hawthorn cudgel under the bar, which he called the parson, and a bowl of salt on every table, ostensibly for the beef.
The work he did was a kind of quiet sentry duty. A tavern keeper hears everything, and Ivo had a talent for listening while apparently polishing a mug. He knew which drovers had lost beasts and which farmers had sold up cheap, which travellers left at first light and which arrived at dusk with the mud of no known road on their boots. When a vampire took a lodging on the road to Richmond in 1659, posing as a clerk on the way to York, it was Ivo who noticed that the man paid in old coin and never once touched the ale, and who sent the boy running for the Proctor cousins. The clerk was taken at the ford before dawn. The tally went into the White Ledger under the tavern's name, and Ivo, who was fond of saying that he had never killed anything larger than a rat, was quietly pleased.
The plague of 1665 and 1666 kept the roads empty and the tavern shut for most of a year, and the couple lived on their stores and their savings. Rosamund fell ill afterwards and did not fully recover; she died in 1674, at fifty-one. Ivo kept the tavern going alone for almost ten years more, with the help of neighbours and of Ross, who by then was travelling widely and returned when he could. He grew heavier and slower, took to walking the fells above the inn in the evenings, and would sometimes stand for an hour at a ridge gate looking east, toward the sea he had left.
He died in 1683, aged sixty-five, in an accident on the fells. The autumn had been wet, the moor was slick with fallen cloud, and he was found at the foot of a limestone scar, apparently after a slip on a path he had walked for thirty years. The old Whitby man in him had never trusted a hill. The family observed carefully that nothing supernatural was involved, and wrote it down all the same.
Ivo Wilberforce has no alias and no tally, and that was as he would have wished. In the Slayerverse he stands as an example of the ordinary people who married into the great families and offered them a room, a fire and a shut mouth. The White Ledger still keeps a small entry for him, listing the tavern's name and the years of its service, and noting that its keeper never once sent away a hunter with an unpaid bill.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
