Piers Armitage

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wide Ledger. Craft: Ledger Recall.

The bell rang at Knaresborough in the dark of a winter night in 1552, and something in the churchyard rang back. Piers Armitage, twenty-six years old and a drover by trade, was walking home along the wall with a stick and a lantern when he heard the sound, a flat, answering note from the tower that no rope had pulled. What he saw in the churchyard in the next quarter of an hour made him a vampire slayer. He had been born in the town in 1526, in Yorkshire, in the mill-house beside the Nidd, and he would die there in 1581, a little short of fifty-five, but between those years he walked more of the north of England than any other Proctor of his generation, and he remembered every step. His father was Giles Armitage, a miller, and his mother was Alice Proctor, a glover and the daughter of Jeremy Proctor and Agnes Barlow, so that Piers grew up the grandson of a fell shepherd and of the spinner who had been the vampire slayer called The Wary Bell. His older sister, Margery Armitage, born in 1523, was the practical, outspoken one of the pair; he was the quiet one. From boyhood he was a watcher. He sat on the sacks in the mill and listened to the farmers talk as they waited for their grist, and he remembered the talk. He could repeat a conversation heard a week before, word for word and in the right voices, and his mother, who had been raised in a family that valued exactly that gift, recognised it at once. She did not praise him for it. She tested him, with lists of names read aloud once and demanded back an hour later, until he could recite forty without error. At fifteen he took work with a drover, and the choice determined everything. A drover walks herds of cattle and flocks of sheep along the old green roads, from the dales and the Scottish border down to the markets at Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, York and Ripon, camping at the stances, paying tolls at the bridges, haggling with graziers and buyers. It is a lonely, weather-beaten, endlessly social occupation, and Piers loved it. He was a thin man with a long stride and a long memory, dressed in a russet coat, with a broad hat, a drover's staff and a pair of dogs that obeyed a whistle. He learned the names of the farms, the inn-keepers, the toll-keepers and the beasts. He learned who owed whom money and who feared whom. He learned, without looking for it, that a drover sees more of a country than the sheriff does. The calling in 1552 was an accident of timing. He was driving a small herd back to the Nidd and had stopped at the town for the night, and the bell answered. He was not trained. He had no stake and no sense of what he faced, only an instinct and the stick in his hand. He survived because the thing in the churchyard was slow and he was not, and because he had spent a lifetime among cattle that panic. He backed it against the wall of the old charnel house, held it there with the lantern and the staff until the dawn came up, and then ran for the mill-house. His mother, hearing the story, opened a chest and took out a handful of hawthorn stakes that she had kept for thirty years. She said nothing of where they came from. In the morning she told him to sit down, and she told him about the White Ledger. His craft grew from the habit he already had. The Proctor tradition called it Ledger Recall: the ability to hold a ledger's worth of entries in the head, names, dates, places, the circumstances of each hunt, and to bring any of them back on demand. In Piers it was a remarkable faculty. He could be asked about a churchyard in a parish he had passed once, years earlier, and he would give the grave count, the sexton's name, the date the yews were cut and the last entry in the White Ledger that touched it. His family called him The Wide Ledger, partly because his knowledge ran so far across the country, and partly because he seemed to keep a book in his head that was wider than any written one. He wrote little himself. He carried the recollection to Wetherby and York on foot and dictated it to his cousins, who wrote it down. As a spy he was perfect, because no one noticed him. A drover is part of the scenery of every market and every inn yard. He could stand in a crowd of men talking about a death, or a sickness, or a haunting, and hear what each said, and a week later in another town he would hear the same story from the other end. He pieced together patterns. In 1558 he noticed that three deaths in three parishes forty miles apart each followed the passage of the same pedlar, and he followed the pedlar through two counties before he found the man in a barn and saw what was wrong with him. His equipment was modest: a matchlock pistol of the short, stubby kind that was just beginning to appear among travellers, good for one loud shot on a dry night; a handful of hawthorn stakes in a leather roll; and a coiled slow-match kept in a tin against the weather. The pistol was loaded rarely, and he trusted the stakes. In 1555 he married Thomasin Mauleverer, a seamstress, whose needle and thread served his purposes as well as his own memory did. She was a small, composed woman with a gift for repairing a torn coat so that it hid a pocket, and for turning a drover's russet into something that could pass in a market or a hall. She mended his clothes after every hunt and asked nothing in return but that he come home. They had no children, a sorrow that neither spoke of readily, but the house at Knaresborough was never empty. Thomasin took in sewing, his sister brought milk, and slayers passing through the town slept in the back room under blankets she had hemmed. She learned the Ledger by listening to his recitations at night, and in later years she could correct him on a date. His middle years ran through the religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from about 1549 to 1560, which he saw from the road. He saw churches stripped and refitted, crosses taken down and raised again, parishes divided and chapels left empty, and he marked each as a risk, since an unwatched, unconsecrated or half-demolished churchyard was exactly what the Guest's kind preferred. He kept a mental map of every such place. Later the rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 closed some of his roads and filled others with troops, and he drove his herds across a shifting country, making notes on the movement of men and the condition of the bridges. His family believed that, had the rebels or the crown wanted a route through the north in those years, he could have given it from memory in an hour. The Proctors never forgot the old story. At Towton in 1461 the Guest had slipped past the lines, and the Faulkners of Lancashire had written in their Red Ledger that a Proctor let it go. Piers read both versions, the Proctor one from his family and the Faulkner one from a trader on the Lancashire road who had copied it at a drovers' fair. He made no comment. He carried the Lancashire text back to Wetherby in his head, word for word, and recited it to his cousins, who argued for three nights. The rivalry, as he understood it, was a quarrel between two tellings, and in a ledger a telling could only be checked against another. He thought the two books, laid side by side, would one day show where each of them had left something out. He did not expect to see it. His last hunt was on the marsh in the autumn of 1581. A report had come from a drovers' stance beside the low wet ground south of the town, where cattle had gone missing and a herdsman had turned up speechless. He went out in the evening with Thomasin's last-mended coat and a lantern, and he did not come in until the following dawn. The night on the marsh was long, cold and wet, and he finished the work he had gone for, but the exposure told on a body that had walked the roads for forty years. He took to his bed, coughed for a week and died, a few days later, with his wife beside him, reciting his last entry. Piers Armitage is remembered in the Proctor family as The Wide Ledger, the drover whose memory held the north of England, the one man who could say what every churchyard between Ripon and York had held. In the Slayerverse he stands for the vampire slayer as spy, a quiet, unremarkable walker on the green roads who carried the White Ledger in his head and who believed, to the end, that the old quarrel of Towton and the Wars of the Roses would one day be settled by simply comparing the books.