Joseph Proctor Lister

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

Joseph Proctor Lister was born in 1673 at Ackworth, a straggling village on the limestone ridge south-east of Wakefield, where the road from Doncaster toward Leeds climbed past the Quaker school and the old church of St Cuthbert. His father, Norman Lister, was a cooper who made ale casks and butter tubs for the farms round about, and the house smelled all Joseph's childhood of split oak, hot iron hoops and the sour tang of the seasoned staves. His mother, Susannah Proctor, was a weaver who worked a loom in the back room and who came from the White Ledger side of the Proctor family. The surname Proctor was carried into the household by her and given to the boy as a middle name, in the custom of the line, so that the Yorkist descent from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, was written into his very name. The Ackworth of his boyhood was a place of hard winters and thin soil. Rye and oats did better than wheat, the tithe barn was full only in good years, and the men who could not live by the land worked as nailers, coopers, wheelwrights and smiths for the drovers and carriers who kept the great roads busy. Money was still the clipped and worn silver of the old reigns, so that a shilling might be a shilling only by courtesy, and much of the trade was done in kind or on chalk and credit. Joseph learned his letters at a dame school and then more sternly from the Quaker teachers his mother favoured, and he was good with figures, which mattered in a family that kept accounts of another kind. Susannah had begun to teach her sons the older tally, the White Ledger's long roll of vampires taken by the Yorkist side since Walter Proctor opened it in 1455, and she taught it as she taught the alphabet, aloud, at the loom, with the shuttle keeping time. Susannah was a slayer, known in the ledgers as the Quaker Lantern, and she took the household across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania in the 1680s, when the persecution of dissenters and the promise of William Penn's colony together made the crossing sensible. Joseph was by then a boy of about twelve or thirteen and already apprenticed. The blacksmith at Wakefield who had taken him on had paid a small premium for him out of the family's savings, and Susannah, who could weigh a risk, decided that a trade learned in England was worth more than a place on the emigrant ship. She left him with his master and with a promise of letters. So Joseph grew up as the one member of his family who stayed, and the younger brothers Amos Proctor, born in 1680, and Norman Proctor Lister, born in 1689, both slayers in their own time, grew up on the far side of the sea. They wrote rarely and unevenly, letters that took half a year to arrive, but the ledger entries they sent home were always copied out in Joseph's hand into a small book he kept beside the anvil. He made an excellent smith. He was a broad, slow-speaking man with a scarred left forearm and a habit of holding his tongs against his chest while he listened, and he shod horses, mended ploughshares, forged hinges and gate-irons and, when a customer asked no questions, made the long thin blades and hawthorn-shod tools that the Proctor family's hunting needed. His forge, once he had his own at Ackworth, stood by the coaching road, and the travellers who stopped there brought news of every market town between York and Sheffield. It was news of the other sort that he listened for, rumours of a grave disturbed at Pontefract or of cattle drained pale at a fold near Barnsley, and he passed the rumours on to the cousins and the hunters who rode through. He was not himself a slayer and never claimed the calling. What he had was the smith's knowledge of iron and silver and a reputation for honesty that made the Proctor hunters trust him with their gear. His marriage in 1697 was arranged between two houses and yet a real match. Heather Thorne, born in 1668, was a dressmaker, a slayer and a daughter of the House of Thorne, the border reiving family of the Northumbrian marches whose later branches went to the Appalachians as mountain hunters. She had come south with a Thorne cousin who wanted a Proctor to vouch for a hunt near Knaresborough, and she stayed in the district, taking a room above a draper's and setting up as a maker of gowns and mantuas for the wives of the local gentry. The year of their wedding was also the year of the great recoinage, when the old hammered silver was called in and the new milled coins came out, and Joseph liked to say that he had been paid in the old money for his courting and had begun his marriage in the new. Heather was nine years older than he was, sharp-eyed, a fine needlewoman and a better shot, and she brought to the forge the Thorne habit of never sitting with her back to a door. Their two sons were born close together, Richard Lister in 1699 and Ezekiel Lister in 1700. Richard, as it turned out, took after his mother and became a slayer, while Ezekiel did not; he grew up quiet, steady and inclined to books, and Joseph, who had no wish to force a calling on anyone, was content that one son should have the trade and the other the ordinary life. The household was noisy and warm. Heather sewed by the window in the front room while Joseph hammered outside, and between them the family managed to keep both the smithy and the hunting going for three decades. Their neighbours in Ackworth knew only that the smith's wife could be counted on to sit up with the dying, and that the smith himself would go out at night to a farm where the dogs would not stop barking. Joseph lived through the Glorious Revolution, which he remembered as a boy of fifteen watching the soldiers of the new king ride south, and through the first Jacobite rising of 1715, when Yorkshire towns hid their plate and the militia was called out, and when the fear of a Scottish army marching down through Lancashire reminded the old families of the Wars of the Roses, that other northern quarrel between two great houses. The Proctors watched the Lancashire road nervously that autumn. The Faulkners in the west were, after all, their ancient rivals in the ledgers, and the tally of vampires taken would go on being kept in the two counties whichever king sat on the throne. Yet no Faulkner ever crossed the Pennines to trouble him. The rivalry was one of entries and reputations and above all of the Guest, the vampire that had slipped away at Towton in 1461, and Joseph, like every Proctor, believed firmly that the fault for that escape lay with the Red Ledger. His own contributions to the White Ledger were modest but steady, and this was the point of him. The ledger does not credit him with a single kill. It credits him with some forty hunts equipped, some three hundred blades and stakes sharpened and tempered, and a page of careful notes on which iron takes a point and which crumbles. When the family's craftsmen were listed a generation later, his name was near the top, and Richard wrote in the margin that his father had made the tools that made the tally. Joseph took the honour without much comment. He was more pleased to be told that a Proctor cousin from the North Riding had been carrying one of his hooks for twenty years. Heather died in 1740 after a long decline, and Joseph, who was then sixty-seven, gave up the forge to a journeyman and moved to a small cottage where he kept a few sheep on the high ground north of the village. He liked the fells in his old age, the wind, the lack of hammering, the long views toward the Dales, and he walked them daily with a stick. It was on one of those walks in 1750, on a wet afternoon when the crag path was slick with rain, that he fell and was found dead by a shepherd's boy. He was seventy-seven. The ledger entry calls it an accident on the fells, and that is all it was, though in the way of old families there was a whisper for a while that something had frightened him. There was nothing to support it. He is remembered in the family as the Proctor who stayed, the one whose forge held the northern branch of the family together while the rest of the line went across the water. His sons carried on after him, Richard for a time as a hunter and Ezekiel as a quiet keeper of the family papers, and Joseph's small book of copied entries, with its scorched corners and smears of soot, was still consulted by later generations of the line. The Slayerverse chronicles list him among the makers, the men and women who did not hunt but without whom no hunt would have been possible.