Richard Proctor, the vampire slayer whom the White Ledger knew as The Wide Sentinel, was born in 1588 in Tadcaster, Yorkshire, a limestone market town on the river Wharfe where the stone for York Minster had once been quarried and where the brewers' carts rattled over the bridge on the Great North Road. He belonged to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist family that had kept the White Ledger since 1455, and he descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married at York in January 1486. His own life was short, and it was a life spent, more than most, on roads: a smith by trade, a broker by temperament and a hunter by calling, he made his name on the coaching routes of the north by a patient and very particular method.
His father, Lawrence Proctor, born in 1554, was a wool factor and a recusant, which is to say a man who dealt in the fleeces of the Dales and who clung, at some risk, to the old faith, when attendance at the parish church was compulsory and fines were levied for staying away. The penalty for that stubbornness was a steady drain of money and an even steadier need for discretion. Lawrence also kept the family's papers through hard times, in a locked chest under the bed, bundled in oilcloth, and among them was the yellowing paper record of the White Ledger's earlier volumes. He was a lean, dry-mannered man with a habit of counting under his breath, and he taught his children that a promise written down could not be broken by memory. Their mother, Sibyl Birtwistle, born in 1553, was a dairywoman, a big-boned, cheerful woman who ran a small herd on rented pasture and made cheese for the Tadcaster market.
There were four children. Katherine Proctor, the eldest, born in 1585, was a slayer, and her example loomed over her younger brother for most of his youth; she was quick, hard and impatient, and she was known to be the better rider and the better shot. Richard followed in 1588. Christiana Proctor, born in 1592, and Abraham Proctor, born in 1594, were the younger pair, neither of them called. Richard's childhood was one of borrowed ponies and a crowded kitchen. The household was constantly haunted by the possibility of a visit from the pursuivants, and the children learned early to hide things and to say nothing to strangers, lessons that later made him both a careful negotiator and a difficult witness.
He was apprenticed to a smith at fourteen, on the advice of his father, who reckoned that a man with a trade in his hands could survive a fine or two. The forge stood at the end of a lane beside the coaching inn, and Richard spent seven years learning to shoe horses, to strike a weld and to make the ironwork the inn needed, such as hinges, lantern hooks and hasps. The work brought him into daily contact with coachmen, ostlers and travellers, and what he observed there shaped his later craft. He noticed that a road has rules: a coach is expected at a certain hour, a driver has a certain manner, an inn has a book in which arrivals are entered. Anything that broke those small, ordinary conventions was worth noting. He was a broad, dark, slow-spoken young man, never in a hurry and never quite at rest.
In 1610, at twenty-two, he was called. It happened on a lonely stretch of road on the moor above Tadcaster, late on an autumn evening, when Richard had gone to deliver a set of new shoes to a carrier stranded with a lame horse. A coach came out of the mist and drew up at the side of the road. It had a driver, and no passengers. The horses were lathered but the driver was calm, and the coach carried no luggage, no lamps and no one to pay him. Every convention of the road told Richard that something was wrong, and the wrongness settled on him with a kind of clarity that he described later as being counted. The driver was a vampire, luring travellers out of inns with the promise of a seat, and when Richard would not step up, the creature took the measure of him for a long moment and drove on. That was the calling: not a fight, but a recognition. He had no mentor. His sister Katherine, who was already hunting, taught him what she could, but he learned most of his craft by watching how roads behaved.
His method was later given a name in the ledger: Procedural Trapping. Where other slayers pursued a vampire through the dark, Richard set out to make the vampire's habits work against it. He learned the timetable of every coaching stage between York and Doncaster, and he compared innkeepers' registers with the ledger of his own kills. When a coach turned up that should not have existed, a driver who was not on any waybill, he would arrange, with the connivance of an ostler or a bridge-warden, for the road to give it no way forward: a bridge that was closed for repair, a gate that was locked, a change of horses that was slow. He worked as a broker of small obligations, obtaining favours from tavern keepers and bridge wardens, and turning a whole network of ordinary people into the walls of a trap. His gear was equally practical: a flintlock pistol, a bundle of hawthorn stakes and a sealed ledger of his own, in which every arrangement was written and stamped with a wax seal.
The alias came from the width of his net. Slayers of the White Ledger spoke of him as The Wide Sentinel because he seemed to stand at every crossroads at once, and a vampire that was taken on the Great North Road was often found to have been walking into his arrangements for weeks. His tally in the White Ledger over the next eighteen years was among the highest of his generation in Yorkshire, and he was not a boastful man about it. The Faulkners of Lancashire, when they compared entries, conceded him the road country and claimed the moors, and there was a good-humoured note in Richard's letters to a Lancashire cousin about the difference between a hunter who chased and a hunter who arranged. His rivalry with the Red Ledger was the old rivalry of tallies, and he preferred to win it quietly.
He did not marry and had no children, and the family accounts suggest that he gave the White Ledger the attention that other men gave a household. He was close to his sisters. Katherine, the other slayer of the family, worked farther west, and they met at the coaching inns to trade information. Christiana, the younger sister, married Alastair Thorne of the border Thornes in 1615, and Richard, who had a smith's fondness for a good craftsman, helped to hang the gate on their new farmhouse. His father Lawrence died in 1621 and his mother Sibyl in 1623, and Richard, as the son who kept the papers, took the chest of records into his own house.
The strain of the road told on him. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns kept him in the saddle in all weathers, and by his mid-thirties he was grey at the temples and lame in the left knee. He died in 1628, aged forty, of what the ledger records simply as old age, meaning that he was worn out well before his time. The sealed ledger passed to Katherine, and the Proctors who followed him kept his method as a discipline of their own. In the annals of the Slayerverse Richard Proctor is remembered as the smith who turned roads into traps, and his rule of thumb, that a vampire keeps a timetable just as a coach does, is still quoted by the keepers of the White Ledger.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
