Miles Shackleton

Detective slayer from a local family, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Grey Tally. Craft: Record Tracing.

The packhorse roads of the Yorkshire dales were not roads in the modern sense. They were causeways of flagged stone laid across boggy ground, sunken lanes between walls, fords and narrow bridges with no parapets, and they carried, in the years of Henry VIII, almost everything that moved between the wool country and the towns: fleeces, cloth, lead, salt, coal, corn. Miles Shackleton spent his working life on them, first as a boy leading a string of ponies, then as a carter with a wagon of his own, and it was on one of them, in the autumn of 1539, that he became something else. Born in 1522 at Skipton in Yorkshire, he was seventeen when the road called him, and thirty-six when the fells took him back. Skipton was a castle town, its great fortress of the Cliffords standing over a single long market street and the canal-less beck that ran beside the parish church. The market was famous for sheep, and on fair days the street was so full of hurdles and lowing beasts that a man could barely pass. The surrounding country was Craven, limestone and gritstone, moor and pasture, cut by deep dales, and its people spoke a broad northern speech that outsiders found hard to follow. Miles's parents are not recorded in the Proctor papers; it is only known that they were poor, that he had no brothers or sisters, and that by the age of eleven he was working for a carrier who kept a string of packhorses on the road between Skipton and Kendal. He learned the country as a tinker learns a pot, by handling it: which ford ran high after rain, which inn served small beer and which served poison, where a horse would balk and why. By fourteen he could load a pannier so that it rode level for twenty miles. By sixteen he had saved enough to buy a shaggy dales pony of his own, and a year later a second-hand wagon, with iron-shod wheels and a canvas hood, which he drove on the lower roads where the ground would bear it. He was a stocky, dark young man with a flat-featured face and a quiet manner, and a peculiar memory for detail. Ask him what a customer had paid, what a load had weighed, what an innkeeper had said in the spring of a given year, and he would answer as if reading it from a page. Other carters found it uncanny. He kept his reckonings not on paper, which he could barely write, but in his head and on notched sticks, and the carriers of Craven learned that a dispute settled by Miles's count was settled for good. His calling came on a lonely stretch of road above Malham, late in the year 1539, on an evening of thin rain and rising wind. He was bringing an empty wagon back from Kendal, the horse walking with its head low, when he saw a coach coming toward him out of the dusk. A coach was in itself a strange sight in the dales of that time; such vehicles were still novelties, associated with the court and the great houses, and it took some miles of road to carry one. This one was black, closed, well-sprung and drawn by four grey horses, and it was driven by a tall driver in a hooded cloak. It passed him with hardly a rattle. As it went by, Miles looked in through the window and saw that it was empty. No passengers, no luggage, no lamp inside. Yet the horses were sweating, and the driver did not turn his head. Something in that emptiness reached into the young carter's mind and settled there: the sudden and complete knowledge of what the road was carrying, and that he was the one meant to stop it. He turned the wagon and followed. He had no weapon but a carter's whip and a hammer, and it is told in the Proctor tradition that he learned his first lesson that night, when the driver climbed down at a barn in a fold of the hills and Miles, watching from the wall, understood that a creature which needs a coach to travel needs also a place to lie. He took the tracks and the wheel-marks, the hoofprints that did not match the horses, the barn that no farmer claimed, and reconstructed from them a picture of the whole route. The next morning, with a hawthorn stake he had cut from a roadside hedge and a borrowed pistol, he entered the barn in daylight and did what was required. It was a botched and terrifying business and he was afterwards sick in the yard. It was also the beginning of a method. The craft that grew from it was called Record Tracing, and it made him a distinctive figure among hunters. A carter knows the paper of the roads: toll-books, ferry lists, innkeepers' reckonings, bills of lading, the tally of who passed where and when. Miles turned these to his purpose. He learned to read a vanished creature in the record of its journeys, a purchase of fodder for a horse that ate nothing, a bed hired and never slept in, a carriage that turned up at three inns on a single night in three different counties. Beside his wagon he carried a matchlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, and he took the alias The Grey Tally, from the colour of his coat and the sticks he notched at the end of each day. His prey were creatures that travelled, and his advantage was that he did too, in plain sight, with the ordinary business of the roads as cover. Between 1539 and his death he took, by the Proctor count, eleven of them. He was not a Proctor by blood. He had no mentor, no house, no book to guide him, and it was only in the mid-1540s that he fell in with the White Ledger, when a carder of wool named Jane Proctor came to Skipton to work the fleeces of the spring clip. Jane, born in 1527, was a member of that family, and it was she who saw, in the cheerful carter with the notched sticks, what he was. They married in 1546, when Miles was twenty-four and Jane nineteen, in the parish church at Skipton with a feast of oatcake, cheese and ale in the yard of a friendly inn. Jane brought with her the family ledger, a small book of white vellum, and a share of the Proctor practice of writing everything down. Miles, who could barely write, dictated his tallies to her by the fire, and she entered them in a better hand than his own. Their household in Skipton was small and busy. Jane worked wool at home, the combed staple hung in bundles from the rafters, the cards clicking under her hands, while Miles was away on the roads for days at a time. Their son Percival Shackleton was born in 1547 and their daughter Thomasin Shackleton in 1551. Percival grew into a stout, cheerful boy who wanted to be a carrier like his father, and lived a long and quiet life, dying in 1616. Thomasin was quicker and shrewder, and died in 1588. Neither was called. The Proctor rivalry with the Faulkners lay a long way over the moors from that cottage, but Miles knew it, and once, near Clitheroe, he found a Faulkner hunter at work on the same trail and had the good sense to share his records rather than fight over them. In the autumn of 1558, in his thirty-seventh year, he set out over the fells above Malham with a laden wagon on a road he had known since boyhood. The weather turned. A mist fell, then rain, and the wagon slipped from the causeway at a place where the stones were undercut by the beck. Miles was thrown, and the wagon came down on him. He died in 1558, aged thirty-six, of an accident on the fells, and was found by a shepherd two days later with his pony standing patiently beside him. There was a notched stick still in his hand. Jane outlived him by ten years, dying in 1568. Miles Shackleton, a vampire slayer for nineteen years, had never been a Proctor by blood, yet his tally was copied into the White Ledger, and he is remembered in the Slayerverse as the carter who read the roads.