Ninian Proctor

Hunter slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Steady Shuttle. Craft: Hound Handling.

Ninian Proctor, the vampire slayer the White Ledger calls "The Steady Shuttle", was born in 1530 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, the eldest child of Nicholas Proctor, a carrier, and Elspeth Thorne, a horse-dealer. Both of his parents carried the family work. His father was known in the trade as "The Slow Warden" and his mother, who came out of the House of Thorne and its hill-stalking tradition, as "The Red Warden". The boy grew up in a house where the talk at supper moved without a seam from the price of a bay gelding to the state of a particular barn on the Knaresborough road, and where nobody thought it odd that a child should be taught to sit still in the dark. He was descended from Jeremy Proctor, the Wetherby shepherd, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner who had rung "The Wary Bell", and the family never let him forget that the Proctors of his branch were the ones who stayed in the market towns and kept their heads down. Wetherby in his childhood was a town that lived by the road. The Great North Road crossed the Wharfe on the old stone bridge, and everything that moved north or south passed through the yards of its inns: drovers with black cattle from the dales, packhorse trains with wool and salt, carriers like his father with covered wains and a lantern slung under the tail-board. The Proctor yard stood behind the market place, a long cobbled strip with stabling on one side and a hay-loft on the other, and it smelled of horse sweat, tar and trodden straw. Ninian learned to read a horse before he learned to read a page. At seven he could pick up a hoof without being kicked, and at ten he was walking young stock to the fairs at Tadcaster and Boroughbridge with his mother's dealing-cord looped over his shoulder. His sister Grizel Proctor was born in 1534 and his brother Wilfred Proctor in 1538, and for some years he was the boy who minded them both in the loft while the grown people went out about the dealing. He was a patient child, which in a horse-yard is worth more than strength. The trade he drifted into was horse-breaking, the long business of teaching a colt to accept a bit, a saddle and a rider without learning to hate any of them. He had no use for the quick methods of the cruel men who broke a horse in a week and sold a ruined animal for a good price. He worked in a round pen of hurdles at the back of the yard, in slow circles, with a long rein and a low voice, and he would take three months over a colt another man would sell in a fortnight. The dealers sneered at him for it until they noticed that the horses he trained did not bolt at a gunshot, a drum or a sudden smell, and that gentlemen of the district began to ask for Proctor stock by name. It was that reputation, rather than any boast, that earned him his later alias. A shuttle goes back and forth and never hurries, and the weavers of the Aire valley, who had a way with a proverb, said that Ninian did his work like a good shuttle: steady, and the cloth came out whole. His youth fell in the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, when the parish service changed and changed back, and the Proctors, who had a ledger to protect, kept their opinions out of sight beside their tally. His calling came in 1556, a year after his father died. Nicholas Proctor had been laid in the churchyard the previous spring, and the household was still short of money and of hands. A farrier's wife at Spofforth sent to the yard in the early autumn to ask whether Ninian would come and sit with her husband, who was a friend of the family and had been dying of a fever for nine days. Ninian went because he did not know how to refuse. He sat in the sickroom through the night, wringing out cloths and listening to the man's breath. Towards dawn the fever broke. The sick man opened his eyes, drank a little water, and asked in a perfectly clear voice for the shutters to be closed. Ninian had opened them himself an hour earlier for air. He looked at the man's face, at the thin line of the first light, at the way the sufferer's hands stayed away from the sill, and understood two things at once. The fever had not been a fever. Something had been feeding at the bed for nine nights, and it was still in the room, in the corner behind the door, waiting for the sun to move. What followed was no great battle. Ninian had a hawthorn stake in his coat because his mother had put it there years before and told him never to take it out. He closed the shutters, as he had been asked, and then turned and put his back to the door. The creature that stood in the corner had been patient for a long time and had not expected the horse-breaker to be more patient still. It went out through the window instead of the door, in a way that cost the farrier his frame and the Proctors a good deal of explaining, and Ninian did not follow. He rode home that morning with his hands shaking so hard that he could not hold the reins and had to walk his mare. His mother, Elspeth, was in the yard when he came in. She looked at him once, went into the house, and came out with the old ledger case and a cup of hot ale. She did not need to be told. That was the first entry in the White Ledger under his name, and it reads that he held a door against a thing that wanted it opened. From then on he was a slayer who worked through his animals. His craft was Hound Handling, a skill he had from his mother's side of the family and which the Thornes had refined on the border for generations. A dog trained as Ninian trained them did not bark at a vampire and did not run. It stood, low and still, with its hackles up and its eyes on the place where the thing was, and stayed so until its master spoke. He kept three such dogs through his working life, rough-coated, grey-muzzled animals out of his mother's kennels, and he took them with him on the long rides he made to see colts in the moorland parishes. There was no better cover for a slayer than a horse-breaker travelling with his dogs, and no one remarked on it. His weapons were the plain tools of the country: a matchlock pistol, which he carried loaded with a blessed lead ball only on the roads where he judged the risk to be high, and hawthorn stakes, three to a belt, cut in the dark of the year and seasoned in the chimney. He counted on the pistol for the first shot only. After that it was the stake, and the dogs. In 1559 he married Marion Hodgson, a net-maker from Whitby who had come inland to the Wetherby fair with a bale of herring net and had stayed to argue about the price. She had a quick tongue and clever hands, and she was not a slayer and did not pretend to wish to be. She did, however, understand a ledger. Their daughter Eleanor Proctor was born in 1561, and he doted on her with a stern absent-minded tenderness that his neighbours found comic: the horse-breaker who could quiet a yearling stallion with a hum and could not persuade a three-year-old girl to put on her shoes. Marion kept the household accounts and the dealing accounts, and in time she kept a second small book at the back of the first, in which she wrote the dates of his rides and the dates of his return, so that she would know when to worry. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 reached Yorkshire like a dry wind. Soldiers on both sides requisitioned horses, and Ninian, who had the best stock in the district, spent a bad winter hiding mares in barns and refusing in a bland and sleepy voice to know where anything was. The old rivalry with the Faulkners over Towton and the Guest, a legacy of the Wars of the Roses, stayed unsettled and courteous, and a Lancashire man who passed through that spring was given bread and a bed and told nothing. His mother Elspeth died in 1572, and for his last fifteen years he was the senior slayer of that branch in the town. He took the work soberly and the reputation more soberly. His tally was small, a handful of entries in thirty years, but every one of them was specific and sworn, and the White Ledger notes with approval that he never inflated a number. He was killed in 1587, in an ambush on a lonely road between Wetherby and Knaresborough, where something that had learned his habits waited beside a ford for a man who always rode the same way home. His dogs, which were with him, held it long enough for the stake to be used, and the thing did not walk away, but it had done its work. Ninian was fifty-seven. Marion brought him home on a hurdle, with the old grey dog walking beside, and she buried him in the churchyard where his father lay. Ninian Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the slow man who made the quick ones look careless, a breaker of horses and a keeper of doors, a vampire slayer who never raised his voice and never lost a tally. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patience that outlasts a threat: the steady shuttle, going back and forth until the cloth is whole.