Thomas Proctor

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Lone Kestrel. Craft: Witness Reading.

The winter fever that came through Preston in the early weeks of 1543 took a whole household in nine days, and it left behind one survivor whom the town did not know how to look at. That survivor was Thomas Proctor, wool-comber, then twenty-four years old, and what he saw in that house on the last morning is the fact around which the rest of his brief life is arranged. He had been born in Preston in 1518, the younger son of Rafe Proctor, a mason's apprentice, and Rohese Barlow, a fishwife, and his elder brother Edward Proctor had been born the year before at Whalley. Both parents were dead by the time he was eighteen. Rohese had died in 1534 and Rafe in 1536, and the boys had divided a small inheritance of tools, a chest and a rented cottage between them. Preston in Thomas's youth was a modest guild town on the Ribble, a place of cobbled market square, timber-framed shops, a parish church of some pride and a town guild whose merchants met every twenty years to renew their charter. Its living was wool, cloth and grain. Sheep from the moors came down in fleeces to the wool-combers, who sat in rows in low workrooms with heated iron combs, drawing the tangled staple into long parallel strands ready for the spinners. It was skilled, dirty work, smelling of grease and hot metal, and paid by the stone. Thomas took to it early, apprenticed in his mid-teens to a comber in Fishergate, and found in the repetitive rhythm a stillness that he could not find elsewhere. His hands learned to feel a fault in a fleece before his eyes could see it, a gift that would later apply to people. He was a small, quick, sandy man with a slight limp from a childhood fall, and he was liked. Neighbours remembered a habit of standing at the edge of a group and looking from face to face as though he were sorting a fleece by its grades. He rarely spoke first. When he did, it was often to say what a person had not said: that the man selling him ale was worried about his son, that the widow at the corner was more frightened than grieving. He was right often enough that people took him for a cunning man, and made a small sign against him behind his back, which he accepted with good humour. He lodged over the workroom, took his meals at a cookshop and belonged to no faction in the parish, which in the years of the Henrician settlement was itself a kind of accomplishment. The fever house stood in a yard off the market square and belonged to a corn factor. Thomas had been called in to comb a consignment of fleeces for the family and found the household sick. He stayed to help, as neighbours did, carrying water and burying the dead in the churchyard in the wet dark. In seven days the factor, his wife, four children and two servants died. In each case, Thomas noticed, the sickness was accompanied by the same faint marks at the throat, and in each case the last words of the dying were of the same visitor, a cheerful cousin who had come up from the coast for a fortnight and had sat with the children. The cousin was gone before the burials. Thomas, sitting alone in the empty parlour on the ninth morning and looking at a table set for a meal that would never be eaten, understood two things at once: that he was not the same man who had come there, and that the one who had done this was still in Preston. That was his calling, in the winter of 1543, and it came without a voice or a sign, only with the plain clarity of a man who has been given work. He had his father's chest, unopened until then. Inside lay hawthorn stakes, a matchlock pistol wrapped in oiled linen, and a small book in which the Proctors of the White Ledger had kept their tally since 1455. Thomas read the ledger through in a single night. He then did what he did best, which was to sit and watch. Over three weeks he followed the cousin's trail across Preston by the simplest of methods, listening to what witnesses did not say. This became known in the ledgers as Witness Reading, the ability to take a frightened person's account, notice what was smoothed and what was omitted, and reconstruct the truth from the gaps. A grocer's wife who mentioned the visitor's hat but not his face. A ferryman who recalled the hour but not the direction. A priest whose eyes slid away from the word churchyard. From such absences Thomas built a map, and it led him to a crypt beneath an unused chapel, where he took the creature at dawn with a stake and a fist of hawthorn, the pistol useless in the confined space. The Broker, as the ledger classed him, was not a fighter but a go-between, and he became known to the Proctors as The Lone Kestrel, for the way he hovered over a scene before he acted and worked without partners. He sold no services and took no fee, but he brokered, in the old sense: he stood between the frightened and the thing that frightened them, carrying information from one side of a village to the other, and trading the small secrets of one household for the larger secret of another. He sealed his ledger with wax, as his family did, and entered each name with a date and a note of who had spoken it. In eleven months he made eight entries, an unusual number for a man with no training and no mentor. His brother Edward, meanwhile working the country around Whalley, wrote to him in an awkward hand that he must find a partner, and Thomas replied that he had not yet met one who kept quiet. There was, inevitably, friction with the Faulkners. The Lancashire houses of the Red Ledger watched the Preston tally as it climbed, and one cousin of that family, a hard-faced man from Clitheroe, called at Thomas's lodging to ask what business a Proctor had in a Lancastrian town. Thomas answered that the creatures did not ask a man's colour before they bit, and offered him a share of the map. The cousin declined, then used it, and both ledgers logged the same vampire that autumn, a quarrel the Proctors preserved as one of the small comedies of the rivalry. Neither man raised a hand; the contest was, as always, of entries and standing. Thomas Proctor was killed in 1544, aged twenty-six, by a blow taken in a churchyard. The place was the yard of a small parish church some miles outside Preston, where he had gone at night after a report of a stranger digging near the graves; the blow came from a shovel, or a spade, wielded by something that had waited under the yew. He was found at dawn by the sexton. His ledger, sealed, lay in his shirt. His brother Edward walked from Whalley to bury him, and wrote the closing line of his entry himself. Thomas never married and had no children. He left behind his combs, his father's chest and a ledger that the Proctors of York counted among the tidiest of the early Tudor generation. A vampire slayer for barely a year, descended, like all Proctors of his line, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, he is remembered as the man who read what witnesses left out. In the Slayerverse he stands as the first of the two brothers to fall in a churchyard, and the one whose silence spoke loudest.