Lambert Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Iron Lantern. Craft: Seal and Sanction.

Lambert Proctor could open a sealed letter and close it again so cleanly that the sender never knew, and he put that gift at the service of the White Ledger for the whole of his working life. The family called him The Iron Lantern, after the shuttered lamp that his grandfather Lancelot had carried before him, and the name stuck because it fitted: a light that gave away nothing and could not be blown out. He was a vampire slayer of the Proctor line, born in 1608 in York in Yorkshire, an apothecary's journeyman by trade and a spy by temperament, and he practised the craft of Seal and Sanction for twelve years before the siege of York took him in 1644, at the age of thirty-six. He never married and left no children. He was the eldest of three, the son of the apothecary Gervase Proctor and the draper Judith Ripley, born in the narrow house in Petergate where the shop front and the shop behind shared a staircase. His sister Hester Proctor was born in 1612 and his brother Bartholomew Proctor in 1615. As the first child he got the whole of his parents' attention for four years and spent them, as far as anyone remembered, in watching. He watched his father weigh out powders and his mother measure cloth. He watched customers lean over the counter and lower their voices, and he learned that people give away a great deal in the way they ask for something. At seven he could tell a lie from the pitch of the voice. At ten he could tell what a visitor had come for before the visitor knew it himself. His grandfather Lancelot Proctor, The Cold Lantern, had died in 1611, before Lambert could know him, but the lantern remained in the family, and so did the stories. Lambert was shown the White Ledger at twelve, and the account of Towton in 1461, and the long dispute with the Faulkners of Lancashire over whether the Guest had been let through by a Yorkist or a Lancastrian hand. He read the entries with a frown. His father, who preferred a quiet life, said the matter was a draw. Lambert privately thought it was a question of evidence, and that evidence, in time, could be found. It was the first sign of the investigator in him, and he did not outgrow it. He was apprenticed to his father's trade and was a journeyman by his early twenties, which meant long days at the counter, the delivery of physic across the city, and the night calls that an apothecary's man gets from households where a doctor will not go. This was the perfect cover. A young man with a leather satchel and a bottle of cordial may go into any house in York at any hour, and Lambert went into hundreds, noting the layout of the stairs, the locks on the cellar doors, who answered the knock and who kept out of sight. He learned to read a room the way his father read a prescription, and he learned that a house that has taken in something wrong smells faintly of damp stone and cold ashes, whatever the hearth is burning. In 1632, at twenty-four, he was called. It happened on a lonely road to the north of the city, in the dusk of an autumn evening, as he walked home from a late visit to a farm. A coach came up behind him at an easy pace, its lamps unlit, and drew alongside, and he saw that it had a driver and no passengers. The horses were steaming and the driver sat upright and still, and there was a long silence in which the journeyman understood that he was being looked at by something that had been waiting. He had nothing but a satchel of bottles and a stout stick. He talked, because it was the only weapon he had, keeping the thing in conversation for the quarter of an hour it took the moon to clear a cloud, while he edged toward a roadside thorn. When the driver stepped down he had a sharpened hawthorn stake in his hand, cut from the hedge with the little knife he used for opening herb parcels, and he was shaking so hard that the first blow missed. The second did not. He walked home in the grey light, put the stake in the cellar, and told his father in the morning, in a flat voice, that he would need a pistol. His craft, in the years that followed, became Seal and Sanction, a method of his own devising which grew out of his work as an apothecary's journeyman and a Proctor. It was a discipline of control over documents and houses: he learned to open a letter and close it again so that no one could say it had been touched, to copy a seal in warm wax, to read a will before the family had, to obtain from a magistrate or a churchwarden the formal permission, the sanction, which allowed him to examine a vault or a cellar or a parish record in perfectly lawful style. A vampire hiding in a respectable house tends to rely on respectability, and Lambert took that away by making the house open itself, politely, and on paper. He kept a small sealed ledger of his own, the ledger that gave his gear its name, where he recorded in cipher what he had found under each roof, and he sealed it every night in wax. His equipment was practical. He carried a flintlock pistol, a new and expensive arm in those years, bought with his savings and his mother's help, and he kept it in the deep lined pocket of the dark coat his mother had made for him, a pocket she had stitched without being asked and without speaking of it afterwards. He carried hawthorn stakes in a roll of leather like a surgeon's, and his apothecary's satchel on top of them. The sealed ledger rode in the inner breast of the coat. In a decade of nights he took a good number of vampires, quietly, in cellars, vaults, attics and one riverside granary, and entered each in the White Ledger in a hand so neat that the family archivists of later centuries remarked on it. He was a reserved man and not easy to know. He lived with his parents in Petergate, ate at the family table, and spoke at it hardly at all. His mother loved him and was afraid for him. His father respected him and was a little afraid of him too. His sister Hester, who understood him better than anyone, took to mending his coats and asking him no questions, and his brother Bartholomew, the dreamer, followed him with his eyes. He had friends of a kind, among the clerks and the chandlers, who knew him as a dependable fellow who always paid his round and never explained where he had been. He thought about marrying once, in his twenties, and gave it up, on the grounds that he could not conscientiously ask anyone to share a house with the thing he did. It was a decision he did not regret and never quite stopped thinking about. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, made his work harder and more important. A city full of soldiers and strangers was a city in which a vampire could move unnoticed, and the wartime habit of burying the dead quickly and without inquiry was an invitation. In 1643 and early 1644 he took four of them, he told his brother, in the lanes behind the Minster, where the confusion of the garrison gave cover. When the siege of York began, in April 1644, he was among the few who moved freely about the city, carrying physic for his father and, under it, his pistol, and the records show that he spent the whole of those months going from house to house in the besieged streets, sealing doors, opening cellars and giving what comfort a quiet man can give to the sick and the frightened. He was at the walls in the last weeks, and he was in the city when the battle on Marston Moor was fought a few miles off, and when the surrender that followed it left the gates open to the victors. He died in 1644, in the siege and its last days, in the course of his errands, doing what he had always done. His sealed ledger was found in the lining of his coat and taken to the house in Petergate, where his family laid it with the White Ledger. It had one unfinished entry, a name and a street, which the family chose not to follow up. Lambert Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the quiet spy of the line, the journeyman who hunted with a satchel, a stake and a seal, and who made the law of the city serve the work of the night. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patient hunter of paper and permission, the one who proves that a vampire slayer may fight with a signature as well as a stake, and the one who carried a lantern that nobody ever saw lit.