The story of Ross Proctor begins in a tavern. He was born in 1646 in York, Yorkshire, in the living quarters above a taproom off Micklegate, and the first sounds he knew were the scrape of benches, the rattle of pewter, and the slow, low argument of carriers and drovers going over the price of oats. His father, Ivo Wilberforce, was the tavern keeper, born in 1618, a large careful man who chalked every reckoning on a slate behind the bar and never lost a farthing. His mother, Rosamund Proctor, born in 1623, was the housekeeper who ran the upper rooms, the linen, the beds and the kitchen. Because the Proctor name passed through her, as family custom often allowed it to pass through women, the boy was raised as a Proctor rather than a Wilberforce, and Ivo, who had no strong feelings about surnames, let it stand.
He grew up an only child among strangers. The inn took in travellers on every road out of York, and Ross learned to sort them by their boots. A wool factor from Halifax wore good leather and greased it; a drover's boots were split and stuffed with straw; a soldier of the disbanded armies kept his heels straight even after years out of uniform. He carried water, blacked shoes, ran errands to the stable, and by ten was allowed to keep the door book, in which each guest's name and the night of his stay were written. It was an education in patience and in noticing. Ross said later that he had learned everything he knew about people by watching them lie about small things, such as the weather on the road or the price of a bed, and that the larger lies had always been built in the same way.
Rosamund taught him letters, and the parish schoolmaster taught him accounts. When he came of age he took up clerkship, working in the counting-house of a York merchant who dealt in lead and grain, and he was good at it in a quiet way; he never lost a receipt and never forgot who owed what. He was not a striking man. Contemporaries described him as of middle height, with a stoop from the desk and a habit of tilting his head when he listened. His mother died in 1674, of a fever that took her in four days, and he stayed on in the tavern for a time to help his father, then returned to the merchant's rooms. He never married and had no children, and the family accepted that as a fact of temperament rather than misfortune.
In 1677 Ross was called to the life of a vampire slayer. He had been sent on the merchant's business to a farmhouse east of the city, where a tenant had failed to send the quarter's rent, and when he arrived he found the door on the latch and the kitchen fire long cold. In the cellar the stores stood untouched: barrels of salt beef, cheeses under cloth, a full sack of oats. Nothing had been taken, and nothing of the household remained. There was no blood, no overturned bench, only a bed-frame in the loft and the coats of five people hanging on pegs. He stood in the cellar with a candle and felt what the Proctor tradition calls the turn, the instant when a person stops being an observer and becomes part of the record. He knew, without being taught, that no thief left a larder alone, and that the people who had lived here had been fed on in some other way entirely. He went back to York and, for the first time in his life, wrote down something he could not explain.
His alias, The Gentle Tinder, came from the way he worked. A Detective in the family's classification, he approached each case like a slow fire, laying small dry facts against one another until they caught. He would sit in a village for a week, asking about nothing in particular, and gradually the pattern would appear: a woman who had stopped going to church, a shepherd who had moved his flock, an inn that had begun to shut early. His craft was Cross-Examination, and it suited a man raised behind a bar. He asked the same question in different ways over many days, in a mild voice, and those who were hiding something found themselves contradicting their own earlier answers. Vampires were, he found, no better at it than anyone else, and considerably worse than most, because they had forgotten how ordinary people talk. He carried a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, with no ledger of his own to seal; his entries went straight into the White Ledger, in a small, upright hand.
The great plague year lay eleven years behind him, but the memory of it shaped the sort of cases he took. He was suspicious of empty houses in particular, because the plague had emptied so many houses honestly, and a false emptiness could hide behind an honest one. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 reached York as rumour and then as fact, and the city's corporation swung from one loyalty to another with what Ross privately called a great creaking of hinges. He kept his head down. His dealings with the Faulkners of Lancashire were mostly a matter of reading their reported tallies and quietly comparing them with his own; he was a competitive man in an unshowy way, and it pleased him when the White Ledger for a given year ran ahead. He never accepted the Lancastrian version of what had happened at Towton, but he was disinclined to quarrel with anyone over it in person.
His father Ivo died in 1683, and the tavern passed to a nephew of the family, though Ross kept a room there whenever the roads brought him back to York. He was a familiar figure in the market towns of the north riding: the quiet clerk with the case of papers who asked one question too many. The hunts that made his name in the family were mostly of the patient kind, the unmasking of a vampire who had passed for a year as a respectable grazier or a widowed innkeeper, and each was solved without a single raised voice.
Ross died in 1713 of the plague, aged 67, in a year when sickness returned to a corner of the county and found him in a lodging where he had stopped to make inquiries. There was no funeral of consequence; he was buried in a parish yard near the place, and his papers went to the family in York. In the White Ledger the entry for his death is brief, as he would have wanted. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as one of the Proctor line's finest listeners, a man who never married, never boasted, and never needed to, and the family still uses the phrase of a careful, patient enquiry that it has taken from his alias: gentle tinder, the kind of fire that does not scorch the hand that lights it.
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