The hounds came home without the huntsman, and that was how Nicholas Proctor became a vampire slayer. It was the autumn of 1531 and he was twenty-nine, a carrier of goods by trade, out in the fields beyond Wetherby after a hunt that a local gentleman had held on the stubble. The pack came in across the ploughland in ones and twos, mud to the belly and silent, which is not how hounds come home. A man who had followed that hunt for twenty years was missing. Nicholas, who had brought a wagon to carry the day's game, took a lantern and went the way the dogs had come. What he found by the field hedge was the beginning of the work he would do for the next twenty-four years, and he was clear-headed enough to do it slowly. He did not charge in. He stood in the dark and asked himself what would be done about it, who must be told, and on what terms. It was the instinct that would make him the family's Broker.
He had been born in 1502 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, the youngest child of Jeremy Proctor, the shepherd on the fells above the town, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner who was also the vampire slayer called The Wary Bell. His brother John Proctor was eleven years older, a grown boy when Nicholas was born; his sister Heloise Proctor, his brother Ambrose Proctor and his sister Alice Proctor made up the rest of a crowded stone cottage. Nicholas was the late child, the one who grew up after the secret was already routine, and who was eighteen when their mother died in 1520 and John laid her sealed ledger on the table. He had half guessed. At a boy's distance he had watched the brass bell, the wet skirts at dawn, and the careful way his mother checked the shutters.
He went into the carrying trade. In Yorkshire in the early sixteenth century, a carrier was the man who connected places: with a wagon, a team of four and a strong tarpaulin he took wool, cloth, leather, malt, letters and the occasional passenger along the Great North Road, between Wetherby, York, Leeds and the market towns of the vale. It was not a glamorous living, but it was a living that put a man in every inn yard in the north, and made him a witness to everything that moved. He knew which bridge was weak in a flood, which landlord watered the ale, which stretch of road at dusk the horses would not take at a trot. His reputation rested on the plain fact that goods placed in his wagon arrived, and that he would say, honestly and to the day, when they would.
That reliability was what made him a Broker. In the White Ledger's old language a Broker was a slayer who worked by arrangement: someone who took a problem between parties, people, parishes, and sometimes the dead, and found the terms on which it would stop. Nicholas did not hunt as his brother did, in long pursuits across the fells. He negotiated. He sought out the frightened and the ashamed, the families of the missing, the priests who knew more than they said, and persuaded them to give him what they knew, on his word that it would be used properly. His craft, taken from his mother's practice and refined by his own, was Seal and Sanction: no finding without a witness, no action without a written finding, no entry accepted until it was sealed. John had inherited the sealed ledger; Nicholas inherited the method, and made it a working discipline of contracts and promises. His alias was The Slow Warden, because he would not be hurried. He used a matchlock pistol, a clumsy, smouldering weapon that he carried more for the noise than the aim, and hawthorn stakes, which were the old family way.
In 1528 he married Elspeth Thorne, a horse-dealer from Hexham in Northumberland, whom he had met when she brought a string of border ponies down to a Wetherby horse fair and found that his wagon was the only one in the yard that could take them to York without losing a shoe. She was a Thorne of the old reiver blood, strong-willed, red-haired, and a good deal quicker with a hound than he was with anything. Their children were Ninian Proctor, born in 1530, who became a slayer; Grizel Proctor, born in 1534; and Wilfred Proctor, born in 1538. It was Elspeth, in the end, who saw that he was already called before he did. She said, a month before the evening with the hounds, that he had been looking at the dark like a man listening for a knock. He denied it. She was called herself in 1529, at a river ford, and by the time Nicholas came to his own calling the two of them were already working in tandem, the Broker and the Hunter, in a household where the stable-lantern was always lit.
The great national agitations of the thirties reached him in the form of his wagons. The northern risings of 1536 and 1537 filled the roads, and a carrier who might be carrying anything for anyone was a suspect to every party. Nicholas, who had made his name on neutrality, hauled sacks of grain for a rebel host in the morning and a royal commissary in the afternoon, and told each of them that he would say the same to the other. It was a close thing. Once, at a bridge near Tadcaster, an armed party stopped the wagon and went through every barrel, and in one of the barrels was a bundle of hawthorn stakes. He told them, with a very straight face, that they were for his hop-poles. They believed him, as everyone always did. He was a man who in all his years of delivery had never been caught in a lie, because he had never been seen to tell one.
The rivalry with the Faulkners, in his generation, was a matter of correspondence. He wrote, under his seal, to the Lancashire hunters whenever the Red Ledger and the White Ledger overlapped, and he took the old matter of the Guest at Towton, from the Wars of the Roses, as a thing to be brokered rather than fought. He never tried to settle it. He thought a quarrel that old had probably outgrown the question that began it, and he said that the right course was to keep the two sides in correspondence and let the question die of politeness. It did not die. But the letters kept going, and that, he felt, was the work.
The years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from 1549 to 1560, made his road business harder and his slayer business easier. Parishes in distress sent for the Slow Warden more often, because every office of authority was uncertain and a man who kept his word was in short supply. He worked through his late forties and early fifties at a steady, undramatic rate, with Elspeth beside him and Ninian beginning to take the lead. By the winter of 1555 he was fifty-three, grey, and slower on the road than he had been.
He died that winter of exposure, on a watch. A report had come from a hill hamlet of a thing that fed on the stock at night, and Nicholas, who would not send a younger man into the cold on an unconfirmed word, went up himself and took the post at the fold before dawn. It was a bitter night, with snow coming in across the moor. He kept his watch to the end, as he had always done, and was found at first light on the wall, upright, his pistol cold in his hand and his stakes beside him. The thing, whatever it had been, never came. The hamlet kept a vigil for him, and Elspeth rode up alone and brought him down.
Nicholas Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the Broker who would not be hurried, the slayer who preferred a sealed agreement to a pursuit, and the carrier who never lost a load or told a lie. The White Ledger records his tallies in a plain hand, each with its witness, and a later keeper added that no one ever disputed one of them. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patience of the long watch, and for the idea that a promise kept in the cold is the best weapon a family can carry.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
