Lancelot Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Cold Lantern. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Lancelot Proctor was born in 1548 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and for sixty-three years he was a quiet man with a very good memory, which in the Proctor family is a more dangerous combination than it sounds. By trade he was a notary's clerk, a copyist and keeper of other people's agreements. By calling, from 1575, he was a vampire slayer known in the narrow circle that knew him at all as The Cold Lantern. He was the eldest child of Gilbert Proctor, a fuller who worked the cloth at the mill by the Wharfe, and Cecily Metcalfe, a chandler who made tallow and rush lights in a back room that smelled of mutton fat from Michaelmas to Lent. The family descended from the household of Jeremy Proctor, the shepherd of the fells above Wetherby, and carried the old Yorkist inheritance of the White Ledger with an air of apology rather than pride. The house of his childhood stood near the bridge, close enough to hear the fulling stocks thumping at the mill and the carters swearing on the Great North Road. Gilbert came home with his hands stained and wrinkled from the soaking, smelling of fuller's earth and stale urine, which was how fullers smelled and which nobody in the town remarked on. Cecily's rooms smelled of tallow and wicks and, on the days she poured moulds, of a heat that made the whole kitchen glisten. Between them they made a household in which light and cloth, the two things a market town cannot do without, were handled with an almost religious care. Lancelot grew up with two younger siblings, Dorothy Proctor, born in 1551, and Anthony Proctor, born in 1555, and he was the one who sat still. He could repeat a sermon almost word for word by the age of nine, and he could say, a month later, who had coughed during it. His mother thought it was a gift. His father thought it was a way of being unpopular. The parish clerk taught him his letters and then, finding him quick, passed him on to a notary in the town who needed a boy to copy leases, bonds, wills and the endless quarrels over boundaries and common rights that fill a market town's legal life. Lancelot was good at it from the first week. He had a clear, narrow hand, he never blotted, and he had the rare habit of reading what he copied. He learned how a bond is worded so that it cannot be wriggled out of, how a witness is questioned so that the evasions fall away, how a man's account of himself can be set beside the account of his neighbour and the gap between them measured. It was an education in suspicion carried out in the politest possible language. The family tradition of Ledger Recall, the Proctor discipline of remembering every entry, every date and every contradiction, found in him a student who needed no teaching, only a few pointers from an elderly kinsman who had kept the White Ledger before him and who recognised the habit at once. He was twenty-one when the northern earls rose in the autumn of 1569, and the rebel companies passed within a few miles of Wetherby on their way south and, a month later, on their way back in disorder. He watched it from the notary's window and from the market square. He wrote down, that winter, the names of men who had ridden out and the names of men who swore afterwards that they had stayed at home, and he did so only because the habit of setting things side by side was already beyond his control. Some of the entries he kept, some he burned, and the experience taught him something the family did not often say aloud: that the neighbours were a record too, and that a quiet man with a pen in a small town knew more about the fear of his fellows than the vicar did. He was not proud of it. He was, in those months, a little ashamed of how much he could remember. The calling came in 1575, on a road at dusk, when the fear left the animals before it left the people. He was riding back from an errand to a manor east of the town with a bundle of engrossed deeds under his cloak, and the carter ahead of him had reined in with a lantern hung from the shaft. The horses were trembling and sweating though the evening was cool, the dogs at the roadside farm had gone quiet, and a flock of rooks that should have been roosting was moving low over the hedge in silence. The people on the road, a carter, a woman with a basket and a boy, were still talking cheerfully about the price of oats. Lancelot noticed that the animals had stopped believing in the evening a full minute before the people did. He took the lantern from the carter's shaft, shuttered all but a slit of it, and walked forward into the ditch-lined dusk with his deeds still under his arm. What he found there, a pale thing crouched at the edge of the hedge with a drover's coat half off its victim, he reported in the White Ledger that night in a hand so steady that a later kinsman took it for a copy of an earlier entry. That was the night the name was earned. The Cold Lantern was a man who carried a shuttered light into the dark and did not hurry. His method followed from his trade. He did not charge about the moor; he asked questions. He sat in alehouses and in the notary's outer office and listened to who had stopped going to church, whose cattle were falling sick, and which empty house had begun to have visitors. He cross-examined carters, millers and widows with such mild courtesy that they gave him more than they meant to. Then he wrote it all down, laid the entries side by side, and found the place where the pattern bent. When the bend was a vampire's lair he went there at dusk, never at midnight, with a matchlock pistol primed for the occasion and a bundle of hawthorn stakes cut by his own hand. The pistol was slow and unreliable and he used it only to break a creature's rush and to buy a few breaths; the stakes did the work. He disliked noise, he disliked rushing, and he thought of a hunt as a deposition that ended in one irreversible way. In 1576 he married Philippa Rishworth, a cloth-seller from Halifax whom he had met when a bundle of her contracts came into the notary's office for checking. She had read them first and found two clauses the lawyers had missed, which he thought was the most attractive thing a woman had ever done in his presence. They had two children, Gervase Proctor, born in 1578, and Prudence Proctor, born in 1581. He wrote their births in the ordinary parish way and then, afterwards, in the White Ledger, because he believed a family record should hold every name that the work had cost or protected. Philippa knew of the calling and was neither frightened nor thrilled by it. She said it was a kind of bookkeeping, and the remark was repeated by the family for generations as the best summary of the Proctor trade. Through the years of his middle age he kept his two ledgers, the notary's and the slayer's, side by side on a long desk, and he was careful that neither should contaminate the other. In the summer of 1588, when the beacons were lit along the coast and the whole north held its breath over the Armada, he sat up through three nights with his pistol on the table, certain that a time of general fear was also a time when something would come out of the dark to take advantage of it. Nothing did, or nothing that he could prove, and he wrote that in the White Ledger too: an honest entry for an absence. He took a small, private satisfaction in the Proctor habit of recording what had not happened. The great sore point of the family was the Guest. The White Ledger said, as it had said since Towton in 1461, that a Lancastrian slayer had let a certain vampire pass through the lines on that terrible Palm Sunday, and the Faulkners of Lancashire kept a Red Ledger that said the reverse. Lancelot read the old entries as an examiner reads a disputed deed. He found the account persuasive and also found that it rested on a single witness. He never wrote this in the Ledger. He told Philippa once, late at night, that he could not decide the matter and did not expect to. She told him that was the most Proctor thing he had ever said. He did not, in the rivalry, ever do anything but compare tallies and keep his courtesy. In his time no Faulkner came to Wetherby and no Proctor went to Lancashire, and the Wars of the Roses stayed in the ink. He was old by the standards of the trade when the plague years and the hard winters of the early Stuart reigns began, and his last field was the long winter of his sixty-third year. He had gone out late into the cold to look at a lane where a flock had been found frozen, stood too long over it with his lantern shuttered, and took the chill home. He died in 1611, of the hard winter, in the room where he had written up so many other people's quarrels, with Philippa beside him and the Ledger shut. He left an orderly desk, a neat chest of hawthorn stakes with the cuts labelled by year, and an index to the White Ledger that the family used for the next three decades. Lancelot Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the clerk who made patience into a weapon, the man who proved that a vampire could be taken by a deposition as surely as by a stake. His cold lantern, a plain tin thing with a horn pane, was kept in the family chest long after the pistol had rusted. In the Slayerverse he stands for the idea that the White Ledger is a living instrument of detection, and that memory, courtesy and careful questioning can hold the dark off for years at a time without a single raised voice.