Tristram Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Steady Heron. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Tristram Proctor was born in 1487 at Padiham in Lancashire, and he came into a household that was still learning how to live with itself. His parents were Thomas Faulkner, Hugh Faulkner's son, raised on the Red Ledger and the longbow, and Isabel Proctor, Walter Proctor's daughter, schooled in law and in the harder arts, who had married at York in January 1486 and brought the two ledgers under one roof. They were called in the family The Mended Rose and The White Bride. Tristram was their first child, born some fifteen months after the wedding, and the family custom by which a surname might follow either side gave him his mother's name. He was a Proctor by choice of the house, and he kept the White Ledger's colours all his life. Padiham was a small weaving and market town on the river Calder, a few miles from Burnley, and its air was full of the noise of water: the mill race, the fulling stocks, the weir. The parish church stood over the town on a rise, and below it ran a street of timber-framed and stone houses, with a market cross, a smithy, and a dozen alehouses. Bread was oat and rye, meat was mutton and bacon, and the chief excitement of the year was the fair. The weather, Tristram remembered, was always wet. He grew up among brothers and a sister: Edmund Faulkner, born in 1488, who kept the Faulkner name, Robert Proctor, born in 1490, who took the Proctor name, Idonea Faulkner, born in 1491, and Rafe Proctor, born in 1494. The five of them were divided between the two ledgers by the family's arrangements almost as soon as they could speak, and each was raised to a different loyalty within the same walls. His parents' marriage was the political fact of his childhood, and it was managed with a formal, watchful kindness. There were two books in the house, one red and one white, and two sets of visitors, and the children were taught to greet each of them in the right order. Isabel taught her sons to reason, to read a deed, to weigh a witness; Thomas taught them to draw a bow, to keep still in a hedge, and to ask no one where they were going. Tristram was the one who took most from his mother. He was a long, narrow, watchful boy with a heron's patience, standing very still and waiting for the thing to move, and he had a great liking for the exactness of tools. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a fletcher in the town. Arrow-making was a trade of real standing in a country that had fought its wars with the longbow. A good fletcher chose his ash or poplar shafts with care, seasoned them for a year, planed them true, cut a nock, fitted a horn or steel head, and glued on three goose feathers, split and trimmed, with hide glue and silk binding. A common soldier's sheaf of twenty-four arrows had to fly alike, and a bowman would notice a difference of a grain. The Crown regulated the trade, fixing the price and the quality, and the fletchers' guild guarded its craft. Tristram was good at it. He completed his apprenticeship at twenty-one, and his arrows were prized by the archers of the district for their exact balance. It was a good living, and it was also a useful one, since a fletcher's workshop was a place where a hunter could keep stakes, shafts and tools without anyone asking why. In 1506, at nineteen, he married Olive Crabtree, a brewster from Haslingden, whose ale he had ordered for a gathering of the craft and whose head-tilting habit of listening he found difficult to leave. They set up house in a cottage with a workshop at the back. Their daughters were Olive Proctor, born in 1508, and Amice Proctor, born in 1511. The years between the wedding and the calling were quiet ones for him, a time of making arrows, of quiet dinners, and of the low-voiced conversations of a man who is not yet a slayer but who has been raised among them. He was present at the ledger's meetings, and he was one of the family who kept its records straight. The calling, when it came in 1519, came late, and it took the form of a neighbour returning from the dead. A man of the street, buried a week before, appeared at his own door on a moonless night and stood there without speaking. His widow, at the upstairs window, began to scream. The dead man would not come in, though the door stood open and the lamp was lit; he stood on the threshold and looked at the room as though he could see something in it that he wanted and could not take. Tristram, running down the street in his shirt, arrived to see the widow's hand on the latch and the thing's face turned toward him, and he knew at once what it was. He was thirty-two. He took his hawthorn stake from the belt where he kept it, and he never afterwards said what happened in the next minute, except that the widow slept that night. As a vampire slayer he took the alias The Steady Heron, and the archetype of Detective suited him. His craft was Cross-Examination, and it was what his mother had taught him: the patient questioning of a suspected household, a witness or a corpse, until the pattern of a lie showed itself. He asked a question and waited for the silence, and he had a gift for noticing which silence was an honest one. He carried a matchlock pistol, an unlucky piece which misfired more often than not, a supply of hawthorn stakes, and a sealed ledger in which every hunt was written down in a fair hand and closed with wax. A number of the entries in the White Ledger from the years 1519 to 1525 are in his writing, and they are clear, dry and complete, the work of a man who thought that a record was the only real defence against forgetting. His relationship with the Faulkners was close and complicated. His father Thomas died in 1512, before the calling, and his mother Isabel in 1518, the year before. He worked with Edmund on several occasions, and the two brothers, one red and one white, were thought to argue cheerfully. The rivalry, as always, was a matter of tallies and reputations, and they conducted it with such humour that the neighbours never suspected it was rivalry at all. Neither of them ever solved the matter of the Guest. He was killed in 1525, at the age of thirty-eight, in a fall from a horse on the road to Burnley, and he was buried at Padiham. Olive was forty-three and a widow. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the fletcher who cross-examined the dead, and his sealed ledger, which was opened only in 1590, is still one of the White Ledger's most trusted volumes.