Roland Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Quiet Bell. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Roland Proctor was born in 1645 in York, Yorkshire, in a narrow house in the shadow of the Minster, in the last months of a civil war that had turned his native city into a battleground. The siege of York in 1644 was a year behind him, but its consequences were everywhere: broken walls, lodging houses full of soldiers, and a corporation still paying off the damage. His father, Henry Proctor, was a yeoman scribe who had followed the armies of the civil war as a clerk, writing out muster rolls, passes and requisitions for whichever commander paid him, and coming home with a fluent hand and a poor opinion of officers. His mother, Ursula Hutton, was a dressmaker, born in 1612, who worked from the front room of the house and taught her son that a thing measured twice and cut once was the whole of respectable behaviour. The household was a paper household. Henry wrote letters for neighbours who could not, drew up wills and leases, and kept books for a dozen small tradesmen, and Roland grew up with ink on his cuffs and the smell of oak-gall and gum arabic in his nose. He learned to read a hand before he learned to ride. Two sisters followed him: Susannah Proctor, born in 1650, who would in time become a slayer herself, and Lettice Hutton Proctor, born in 1654, who took her mother's trade of weaving instead. By the time Lettice was born the Commonwealth had settled over the country, the Minster was closed to worship in its old form, and the York of Roland's boyhood was a cautious, watchful place where a clerk who knew whose name to put on which document could always find work. He became a clerk in the ordinary way, first as his father's copyist and then in the service of a York attorney, where he sat on a high stool in a room off Stonegate and copied conveyances by the light of tallow candles. The Proctor family were the keepers of the White Ledger, the Yorkist tally of vampires taken since 1455, and Henry had made sure his son understood it, as a fixed piece of family business, long before there was any thought that Roland would ever write in it. He was married young, in 1661, at sixteen, to Clemence Kershaw, a dairywoman two years his elder, born in 1643. It was a match made between two families who trusted each other; she brought a knowledge of cheese and cattle and a level temper, and he brought a steady wage. They set up house in a rented tenement, and their daughter Avice Proctor was born in 1664, when Roland was nineteen. The great plague year of 1665 and 1666 took the country in its grip. York closed its gates to travellers from the south, houses were marked, and the market moved outside the walls. It was in the middle of this, in 1666, that Roland was called, and became a vampire slayer in a single evening. He was travelling on the coaching road with a bundle of writs, and stopped for the night at an inn yard, where a guest arrived asking for lodging and would not cross the threshold. The landlord pressed him, the horses shied, and Roland, who was standing by the pump with a lantern, understood in a single moment what the stranger was and what he himself had been made into. The calling in the Proctor tradition often arrives as a kind of clear, cold attention, and Roland later described it as the sensation of reading a document and seeing at last the clause that the whole contract turned on. He did not run. He went to the stable and found a pitchfork handle, and it was the landlord's boy who got the door shut. His alias, The Quiet Bell, came from the manner of his hunting rather than from any single deed. As a Spy in the family's own taxonomy of roles, he worked by listening; he took rooms in inns, sat in the corner of coaching houses with his ink and paper, and let travellers talk. His craft was Cross-Examination, a habit of patient, courteous questioning through which a man's small lies fell apart without his noticing. A vampire posing as a merchant might survive a magistrate, but rarely survived Roland asking, for the fourth time and in a slightly different form, where exactly he had slept on the eleventh of the month. His gear was practical: a flintlock pistol for when talk failed, hawthorn stakes carried in a long clerk's case, and a sealed ledger in which he set down each name, date and place, sealing the pages with wax against inspection. The entries were terse and legal in tone, the language of a man who expected to be read by a court. Clemence gave him a second child in 1667, Roland Kershaw Proctor, and for some years the household ran on a double schedule, days of copying in the attorney's office and nights of watching the roads. It was Clemence who covered the absences, blaming the attorney's business for the late hours, and who fed travellers of an odd sort who came to the door needing a bed. She died in 1682, and Roland was a widower for the twenty-five years that remained to him. He did not remarry, and the ledger notes that his entries in the following months were fewer, that he spent the time closer to home, and that his sister Susannah took over a good part of the roadwork. The political events of his later life, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 chief among them, touched him mainly as a matter of documents. A new king meant new oaths, new loyalties to be professed, and a great deal of copying. Roland took the oaths and thought about them very little. He had watched a war end and another king restored, and he had come to regard the changes of dynasty as a rotation of names on a page. What he did watch for, throughout, was the odd traveller, and the White Ledger from those decades shows his hand in the Yorkshire entries with a steady rhythm; he was not the family's most famous hunter, but he was among the most reliable, and his entries were always the cleanest. His relations with the Faulkners of Lancashire were formal and, in the family's way, quietly competitive. Each ledger kept its own count, and the count of Yorkshire in the second half of the seventeenth century was a matter of pride. Roland had no bitterness in him. He once wrote in a margin that the Guest, the vampire who slipped away at Towton, would be found, if he was ever found, by a clerk and not by a soldier, since the Guest had evidently been very good at leaving no trace, and only a paper trail could do the work. It was a wish that later Proctors kept and treated as a family proverb. Roland died in 1707 of a hard winter, aged 62, in the house in York where he had lived for decades. His daughter Avice, who lived until 1723, kept his sealed ledger, and his son Roland Kershaw Proctor, who died in 1711 without taking the calling, saw that his father was buried beside Clemence. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as a hunter who fought with questions, and the Proctors still say that a well-made record is a weapon.