Mary Lister

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Still Scythe. Craft: Quiet Confrontation.

The ship came in on the ebb after a three-day storm, with her sails set and her deck scrubbed clean, and not a living man aboard her. That was the morning in 1733 when Mary Lister, sixteen years old and carrying two pails of milk to a landing at Bristol, Pennsylvania, became a vampire slayer. She had been born in that river town in 1717, the daughter of a schoolmaster, and she would spend the next seventeen years as a dairywoman, a wife, a mother and a hunter known in the Proctor circle as The Still Scythe. She died in 1750 of a fever caught in a plague house, aged thirty-three, having gone in where others would not. The White Ledger has kept her entries in a hand that grows steadier the further one reads. Bristol lay on the Delaware some twenty miles above Philadelphia, a small trading town of brick and clapboard houses with a ferry across to Burlington in New Jersey, a market house, an Anglican church and a Quaker meeting that saw eye to eye on nothing but the price of fish. Farms ran back from the river in green, orderly patches, with dairy cattle grazing on the meadows and wheat on the uplands, and the smell of a Bristol morning was of woodsmoke, river mud and cream. Mary's father, Norman Proctor Lister, taught school in the town, and her mother, Susan Bowen, was a seamstress who took in work from the ferry-keepers' wives. Susan died in 1724, when Mary was seven, and the girl and her older brother Amos Lister were raised in the schoolroom, among slates and the smell of chalk and ink. Norman was also the slayer called The Wary Wren, and he did not hide it from his daughter for long. Mary was a watchful, grave child, with grey eyes and hair the colour of straw, who seemed to have inherited her father's habit of listening before speaking, and who liked animals better than most people. Amos was quick and restless. Mary was still. When the schoolmaster began to talk of the family's work, it was to her that he addressed most of it, and he let her sit in on his lessons in the reading of a room: how to tell from a dropped latch or a disturbed rug that a house had been entered, how to keep a lantern low, how to stand so that a creature must turn to face you. He taught the rest by example, on the roads at night with his long rifle across his arm. Then came the storm and the ship. It was a Bristol brig, driven from her moorings, and she drifted in against the shore with her foresail flapping. Mary and two neighbours boarded her. The crew's supper was laid on the table, the bread had not been touched, and the hold was full of good cargo and no men. There was a smell in the cabin she could not name, and a stain on a chair. What she did next was to sit down in the dark with a lantern shuttered, in the manner her father had described, and wait. She waited an hour, and then a second. Something came up out of the hold, looking for what it had failed to find, and she did not move. In later life she described the moment as the one at which she discovered that the thing she was best at was doing nothing at all. Her craft, Quiet Confrontation, grew from that. It was not a technique of violence but of presence, an ability to hold a still, direct, unhurried gaze on a creature that expected fear and to let the expectation curdle. She was trained as a detective by temperament, and the ledger's later classification of her as the Detective type is apt: she did not rush at a scene, she read it, spending hours in a house or barn before she touched anything, and her reports are full of small deductions about footprints, milk that had soured too early and animals that would not pass a certain gate. Her gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, cast by her father in the schoolhouse stove from a set of broken pewter spoons and a pocket watch case. She carried a milking stool everywhere, and it was said that an enemy who found her sitting calmly on it in the corner of a dark barn had already lost. Her work as a dairywoman gave her a cover that no one questioned. A woman with pails at dawn or dusk could go anywhere on a farm, and she knew every cowshed on the river road. She milked for a dozen families, built up a small trade in butter and cheese, and, from the milk-house doors, saw who was well and who was failing. The ledger credits her with a run of entries in the middle 1730s along the Bucks County shore, and with a particular case in which a herd of cows went dry, one by one, at a farm that had recently been sold. She sat up four nights in the milk house, and on the fifth found the reason. In 1737 she married William Kincaid, a wheelwright of Germantown and also a slayer, a man who worked by preparation while she worked by patience. She was twenty. They met over a body and argued about the cause, and the marriage seems to have been a happy one in the sense that they never ran out of things to debate. They settled at Germantown, with his wheel shop at one side of the yard and her milk house at the other, and raised two sons. Isaac Kincaid Proctor, born in 1738, became a slayer of the White Ledger. William Kincaid Proctor, born in 1742, did not, and stayed at the shop. Both boys bore the Proctor surname, in keeping with the family custom that names pass through the daughters, and Mary insisted on it with a firmness that surprised her husband, who did not mind in the least. Mary's relations with the Faulkner line were remote. The Red Ledger's Massachusetts hunters were names in letters to her, and she found the family quarrel over Towton and the Guest rather a waste of good hunters. She kept her own tally and was content that it should be compared with theirs. When cousins from the north came through Philadelphia she fed them, drew maps for them and sent them on. Like many of her house she took her ledger seriously without believing that it settled anything. In the winter and spring of 1750, a fever spread through the poorer quarter of the river landings, and a house in which several had died was shut up by the town. Mary, who had reason to suspect that more than the fever was at work in it, went in alone. She found what she expected and dealt with it, and came out with the fever herself. She died in 1750, aged thirty-three, leaving Isaac, twelve, and William, eight. Her father had died two years before her, and her husband survived her by thirty-two years. The White Ledger records the hunt and its cost in a single sentence. In the Slayerverse histories Mary Lister is remembered as the slayer who could sit longer than anything she hunted.