The White Ledger of the Proctors has a page for Ross Thorne that is unusual in one respect: the tally at the foot of it was never added up. The entry is headed with his alias, The Dry Ledger, and the clerk who wrote it in the 1630s left the total blank, with a note that the man himself had kept no count and would have been annoyed to see one. Ross was a ferryman by trade and a vampire slayer by necessity, born in 1590 at Hexham in Northumberland, and he died in 1628 on a lonely road, at the age of thirty-eight, in an ambush that had been waiting for him for years.
Hexham in the 1590s was a border town still living under the memory of the old raiding economy. The great abbey church stood half in use above the market place, the Tyne ran wide and quick below the bridge-less crossing, and the surnames of the district, Charlton, Milburn, Robson, Thorne, were the names of families who had once lived by the reiver's code of cattle, blackmail and feud. The union of the crowns in 1603 was beginning to bring the Middle Marches under ordinary law, and the old riding families were finding new ways to make a living. Ross's mother, Rowena Thorne, born in 1565, was a dressmaker in the town, a small, exact woman who cut cloth for the wives of the better sort and, in the hours after dark, took a long-stocked staff from behind the press and went out onto the Tyne haughs. She was The Grey Sentinel to those who knew, and the House of Thorne, border reivers of the Northumbrian marches and later mountain hunters, counted her among its steadiest.
Ross grew up without his father in the record and without his father in the house, and his mother filled the gap the way she filled every other one, by making it useful. He learned to read the river as other boys learned their catechism: the colour of the water after rain on the fells, the way an eddy shifted at the ford, the weight a ferry-flat could carry before the current took it. At fifteen he was poling passengers across the Tyne at a crossing his family's kin had worked for generations, and the trade taught him what a slayer needs, patience, balance, and a quiet watch on strangers, since every ferryman knows that people who cross at night usually have a reason. He was a broad, sunburned young man, sparing with words, with a stubborn jaw and a reputation among the boatmen for never losing his temper until the moment that he did.
The calling came in 1608, when Ross was eighteen. He had quarrelled with a brother, and in the version the family kept it was a proper quarrel, about a debt and a boat and a woman's opinion of both, ending with the brother storming off upriver into a hard winter night. Some days later the brother came back to the ferry stage. He had been buried in the churchyard in the interval, and he had come back to finish the argument. Ross fought him on the wet planks with a boat hook, and what he understood in the course of that fight was so complete and so terrible that he did not, afterwards, speak of it for a year. It was Rowena who found him at the water's edge at dawn and took him home. She trained him from that morning, drilling him in the border hunting of the Thornes, and he was a quick student, though a sullen one.
His methods followed his mother's teaching and his own temperament. His craft was Hound Handling. The Thornes had always bred lurchers and rough-coated tracking dogs for the fells, and Ross took the tradition further than his kin had, keeping a pack of three or four dogs that he trained to tell the smell of a vampire from the smell of anything else in the district. Where a hunter on foot lost a trail at the edge of a beck, the hounds picked it up on the far side; where a lair lay under a barn floor or in a disused lime-kiln, they stood off and gave tongue in a way that had nothing to do with rabbits. His gear was a flintlock pistol and hawthorn stakes, the pistol for stopping a fast thing on open ground and the stakes for finishing it. He was known to be a hard bargainer with the men who hired him for other work as well, a habit that earned him the mercenary's label in the family's shorthand, since he took payment from farmers, innkeepers and the odd frightened magistrate for clearing a district and did not pretend to be doing it from charity.
The alias came from that habit of trading. The Dry Ledger was a taunt at first, coined by other hunters who thought him mean, a man who tallied in coin and not in glory. The name stuck because it turned out to describe him: he kept his accounts flat and unadorned, no embroidery, no legends, and his hunts were reported in the plainest possible terms. Later, when he had married into the Proctors, the name took on a second meaning, since the White Ledger was the very book his wife kept.
That marriage came in 1617. The Thorne family's long habit was to lean on the York and Yorkshire houses, and Ross, who had by then moved his boats and dogs south to the ferries and coaching roads of Yorkshire, met Katherine Proctor through the trade. She was the daughter of a York clerk, trained from girlhood to keep records under pressure, and she was a slayer in her own right, with a steadiness that matched his. They married that year, and it was said in the family that the Dry Ledger had at last found the one person who wrote things down more precisely than he did. Katherine kept the White Ledger entries for both of them, and in her own correspondence she pressed the Proctor case over the Guest of Towton, which no one has ever resolved, with a forcefulness that stopped short of open dispute with the Faulkners. The rivalry, on her side and his, was a matter of tallies and reputation, and Ross treated it mostly as a contest that he would not have chosen but did not mean to lose.
Four children were born to them in the coaching towns of the Yorkshire roads: Henry Proctor in 1618, Leonard Proctor in 1621, Rosamund Proctor in 1623 and Mercy Thorne in 1624. The surnames followed the family custom, some children taking Proctor and one the Thorne name. Henry, who lived to 1691, was not called, and neither was Rosamund; Mercy also lived an ordinary life until 1693. Leonard, who died in 1697, became a slayer, and the old accounts say his father taught him to read the hounds before he could read a page. The household lived in a cramped house near an inn yard, with dogs in the outhouse and cloth on the table, and its winters were hard: the plague years and the hard frosts of the early Stuart reigns ran through the towns on the roads, and Katherine and Ross buried neighbours and nursed children, all the while keeping hunting hours.
Rowena Thorne died in 1627, and Ross took her death worse than anyone expected, going out alone on the road that winter for longer stretches than was sensible. In 1628 the thing he had been dogging for months found him instead. He was riding back from a job on a lonely stretch of road between market towns when the ambush closed around him, men and something that was not a man, and the hounds were not with him that night, having been left lame in the yard. He died on the road aged thirty-eight. Katherine, who outlived him by eight years and died in 1636, filled in the last page of his entry herself and left the total blank, as he would have wanted. In the Slayerverse he remains a hard, honest, quiet man, remembered chiefly for his dogs.
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