Leonard Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wild Ferryman. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Leonard Proctor built barrels for a living in York and killed vampires in the hours between, and the White Ledger remembers him under the alias The Wild Ferryman, a name that made no sense to anyone outside the family until they learned who his father had been. He was born in 1621 in the city of York, the second son of Ross Thorne and Katherine Proctor, and both of his parents were vampire slayers before him. His own calling came in 1644, in a cellar, in the worst year the city ever knew, and he carried the craft of Cross-Examination through fifty-three years of hunting until the plague took him in 1697. His father, Ross Thorne, born in 1590, was a ferryman of the old Thorne stock, a big, weather-beaten man who worked a boat on the Ouse and who was known to the Ledger as the Dry Ledger, on account of a habit of never writing anything down and never forgetting a word. His mother, Katherine Proctor, born in 1585, was the daughter of a York clerk, trained from childhood to keep records under pressure, and known as the Plague Clerk for her work in earlier outbreaks. It was a strange household: the father who could move across water in the dark without a lantern, the mother who could reconstruct a night's events from a stain on a ledger page. Ross died in 1628, when Leonard was seven, and Katherine in 1636, when he was fifteen. The children were raised thereafter by aunts and by the wider family, and the eldest, Henry Proctor, born in 1618, took charge of the household, with Rosamund Proctor, born in 1623, and Mercy Thorne, born in 1624, following behind. None of the three became a slayer. York in those years was the second city of the kingdom, a place of narrow, overhanging streets huddled inside its medieval walls, dominated by the great Minster and crowded with taverns, guildhalls and warehouses along the river staithes. Wine from Bordeaux, lead from the dales and salt fish from the coast all passed through it, and every commodity needed a barrel. Leonard was apprenticed at fourteen to a cooper in the Shambles district, and learned to raise staves, hoop them with hazel or iron, and toast the inside with a fire of shavings until the wood sweated. He liked the rhythm of it, the mallet on the hoop, the smell of oak and pitch. By twenty-one he was a journeyman, broad in the shoulder, blunt-fingered, with a habit of testing every cask by rapping it and listening. That ear was the beginning of his craft. Cooper's work is a discipline of listening for what is hollow. In 1644, when the Parliamentary army and its Scottish allies laid siege to York through the spring and summer, the city starved and the cellars filled with the sick. That summer, when the siege ended in the surrender that followed Marston Moor, Leonard was sent by his master to check a merchant's stores in a house near Micklegate. He went down into the cellar and found the barrels standing untouched, the hams still hanging, the salt fish in their casks, and the household gone. No blood, no struggle, only the meal laid out in the room above and a chair overturned. Standing there in the dark, he understood with the sudden clarity that his mother had once described that he was of the blood. He was twenty-three. The Proctor cousins, who had watched him for years, took him in hand. His training was not the swordplay of the cavalier but the work of the interrogator: he was taught to question a scene, a witness or a creature until it contradicted itself. The craft called Cross-Examination was the family's name for it, and Leonard turned out to have a gift. He could sit with a frightened servant for an hour and by the end know which of the household had opened the door. He could put a series of questions to a vampire, in the moments before a stake, and be given answers that the creature did not know it was giving. His alias, the Wild Ferryman, was partly inheritance from his father and partly his own reputation: he was capable of leaving his cooperage on the river bank, crossing the Ouse in a borrowed skiff and being three miles from the city by dawn with a pistol in one hand and a list of questions in the other. He carried a flintlock pistol, at a time when many still preferred the matchlock, and a set of hawthorn stakes, sharpened with his own cooper's draw-knife and carried in a leather quiver under his coat. His methods were slow and exact. In 1651 he worked for a month on a run of disappearances from the lodging houses of Bootham, interviewing landladies, ostlers and night-watchmen, and eventually cornered the thing in a brewer's loft. In 1658 he tracked a vampire calling itself a Dutch wine factor from the York quays to a house at Acomb, and questioned it through a locked door for an hour before it gave up the name of the older creature that had sent it. The name he took to the White Ledger, and although the trail ran cold, it was one of the entries that later generations returned to when searching for the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461, whom the Yorkists and the Lancastrians each blame the other for losing. Leonard was sceptical of both sides' certainty. He said it was a question nobody had yet asked properly. He never married and had no children. The family said that his hours were too odd and his temper too short, though his sister Rosamund, who married an innkeeper named Ivo Wilberforce in 1645, found him a warm uncle to her son Ross Proctor and often sent the boy to York to learn a trade. His relations with the Faulkners were correct and slightly wary. He respected their record, disliked their bragging, and once bet a Lancashire cousin a barrel of ale that the White Ledger would exceed the Red by the century's end. The cousin, according to the story, paid up in 1699, two years after Leonard was dead. The Restoration brought him work of a steadier sort, and he made a comfortable living coopering for the wine merchants and brewers of the city. The plague years of 1665 hurt York but did not break it, and Leonard spent them sealing houses and questioning the sick, in his own view the most useful thing a man of his trade could do. He grew grey and stooped but was never seen without his mallet. In the 1690s he kept a small shop in a lane off Stonegate and was known to schoolboys as a gruff old man who let them watch him fit a hoop. He died in 1697, of the plague, in one of the last small outbreaks in the north, at the age of seventy-six. He had caught it, the family said, from a dying apprentice he had refused to leave alone. He was buried in the churchyard nearest his shop, under a stone carved with a barrel and a stake. In the Slayerverse Leonard Proctor is a figure of quiet respect: the cooper who found that a hunt is mostly a matter of asking the right question twice. The White Ledger credits him with more than two hundred entries, and the phrase cross-examine the cellar, first written in his own hand, remains an instruction that Proctor apprentices learn to this day.