Richard Lister

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Flint Furrow. Craft: Witness Reading.

The dogs would not go near the body. That was what Richard Lister remembered, in later life, of the day in 1715 when a stranger died in a barn near his father's forge, and it was the beginning of his career as a vampire slayer. He was sixteen, born in 1699 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and by the end of the following winter he had a rifle in his hands and a mentor at his elbow who happened also to be his mother. For the next forty-six years he divided his time between the cloth trade, in which he became prosperous, and the White Ledger of the Proctors, in which he became known as The Flint Furrow. Philadelphia at the turn of the century was the largest town in English America, or close to it, a gridded city of brick houses between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, founded barely two decades earlier by William Penn on the principle of religious toleration. Its streets were paved unevenly, its wharves were crowded with sloops from Barbados and Bristol, and its markets on High Street sold everything from Jersey butter to Madeira wine. Quaker merchants ruled its counting-houses and Anglican gentlemen were beginning to build handsome townhouses along the river. The great fever epidemics that returned every few summers, the yellow fever among them, sent the wealthy to their country places, while the smiths, carpenters and carters stayed in town and hoped. Richard's father was Joseph Proctor Lister, a smith, born in 1673, who kept a shop with two forges near the waterfront, where he made ship's ironwork, hinges, nails, farm tools and the occasional lock. His mother was Heather Thorne, born in 1668, a dressmaker, of the House of Thorne, the Northumbrian border people whose kin had crossed into Pennsylvania, and she was also the vampire slayer called The Iron Crook. The household on the waterfront was one of noise and sparks by day and of mending by lamplight at night. Richard had a younger brother, Ezekiel Lister, born in 1700, who took to the forge rather than the ledger and never showed any sign of the calling. Richard was educated in a Friends' school and then apprenticed to a cloth merchant on Second Street, where he learned the long chain of the trade: English broadcloth and Yorkshire kerseys from Bristol and Liverpool, Irish linen, Dutch duffels, the price of indigo, and the terms of credit that bound a merchant to a shipowner and a shipowner to an underwriter in London. He was a good clerk, careful, exact and disliked by no one, with a sober dress and a habit of thinking before answering. Something in the work suited the craft that was to come. A cloth merchant learns to judge a fabric by handling it, to detect a false weight, a moth-eaten bolt or a lying invoice, and to notice at once when a customer's story does not fit the goods. The calling came in 1715 in a barn outside the city, where a stranger had been found dead in the straw. The farmer's dogs, ordinarily fierce, lay flat outside and whimpered, and Richard, who had gone out with his father to collect some ironwork, found himself in the barn alone with the corpse and knew, with an unpleasant certainty, that it was not the only thing in the building. His mother arrived within the hour. She had already understood. She took the boy by the shoulder and told him what the family was, and from then on she was his mentor. She taught him the long rifle and the making of silver-cast shot, and she taught him the craft that emerged in him within the year, Witness Reading: the trick of hearing a report from a frightened person and knowing which part was true. In a colony where every farm had a rumour, that was a useful gift. He carried the same gear as his mother, a long rifle and silver shot, and he combined his hunting with his trade in ways that suited both. A cloth merchant travels. He rode the road to Lancaster and Reading and up to the Susquehanna country, calling on country storekeepers, and wherever he stopped he listened to the talk of the taproom and the counter. A disappearance, a strange sickness among cattle, a family that had left in the night: all this came to him in the ordinary course of business. He kept two notebooks. In one he recorded his orders. In the other, in a private shorthand, he recorded who had said what and where. From these accounts the White Ledger's Philadelphia entries were built, and his tally, though it never reached the totals of some of his rivals, is noted by later keepers for its accuracy. The wars with France on the frontier touched him mostly through trade. In the 1740s, when war with Spain and then France spread across the colonies, privateers sailed from Philadelphia and the price of cloth rose and fell wildly. Richard prospered and saved. He bought a substantial brick house near Second and Walnut Streets, dealt with merchants in Liverpool and Bristol, and gave freely to the poor. He never married, and no children are recorded. The family thought his chief passion was the ledger, and that it was enough. He kept a good table, read Defoe and Addison, and was a friend of Benjamin Franklin's junto in a modest way, without ever being of it. His feelings about the Faulkners were those of a careful merchant toward a competitor. He respected their record and questioned it. He was among the Proctors who thought the Faulkners had padded their tallies in the New England colonies, and he expressed the view in a letter to Norman Proctor Lister, who kept the White Ledger in the neighbouring reach of the family, in language so mild that the Faulkners took it as praise. He also believed that the matter of the Guest at Towton was not to be settled by anyone alive, and that the sensible course was to keep good books and let the rest lie. His mother died in 1740, and his father in 1750, and Richard buried both from the house in Philadelphia. In 1761, at sixty-two, he took a journey into the upland country to inspect a property and to look into a matter for the ledger, and on high ground that the local people called the fells, he slipped on a wet shelf of stone and fell. He was found by a farmer's boy. It was an accident and nothing more, a plain end for a man who had spent decades among risks that were not plain at all. The Proctor family remembers him as the merchant hunter, the man who proved that the White Ledger could be kept from behind a counter. In the Slayerverse the Flint Furrow is cited as a pattern of quiet, thorough, unglamorous work: a slayer who did his hunting by asking questions and who left behind a ledger in which every entry can still be trusted.