William Kincaid

Broker slayer from a local family, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line, known as The Still Bridle. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

William Kincaid was born in 1711 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a long straggling village of stone houses strung along a single road north-west of Philadelphia, and he died in 1782 after a fall from a horse, aged seventy-one. Between those two dates he made wheels, married into the White Ledger, and became a vampire slayer known in the river country as The Still Bridle. He was never a Proctor by blood. He carried no Yorkist inheritance and no house name, and his sons bore the Proctor surname only because the family custom of the Proctor line ran through the mother, Mary Lister. The ledger keepers nevertheless entered him as a full hand of the White Ledger, and his tally is one of the cleaner ones from the middle of the eighteenth century. Germantown in his boyhood was a place of German-speaking weavers, Mennonites and Quakers, of linen looms in cellar rooms and of long wagons rolling toward the Schuylkill landings. The province was governed by the Penn family's deputies and by an Assembly that argued endlessly with them, but for most of its people the politics that mattered were the price of wheat, the rate of exchange between Pennsylvania paper money and hard silver, and the condition of the roads after a wet March. William's people were of Scots-Irish stock and arrived poor. His parents' names were never entered in the ledger and the family did not preserve them, only the fact that the boy was put to a wheelwright while still small, sweeping shavings and steaming felloes, and that he learned the trade in a shop where the smell of hot ash and oak never left his clothes. Wheelwrighting was a trade of judgement rather than strength. A cart wheel is a compromise between wood that wants to shrink, iron that wants to hold, and a road that wants to break both, and the wheelwright must dish the wheel so that the load falls sideways as well as down. William was said to have the steadiest eye in the township for a true rim. He shrank his tires on in a ring of fire in the yard, quenching them with buckets in a hiss of steam, and the neighbours came to watch because he did it without hurry. It was a habit of patience he would carry into the other work of his life. He grew into a tall, narrow, sandy-haired man with big burned hands, sparing with words and not given to the loud religion of the revivals that later swept the colony. The calling came to him in 1734, when he was twenty-three, beside a river ford where a traveller failed to leave the water. He had been delivering a pair of wheels to a farm on the far bank, and at the crossing he saw a man standing waist-deep in the current with his horse gone and his coat spread on the surface, not moving, not shouting, only looking at the bank as though waiting to be invited. William called to him twice and got no answer. The water was cold and moving fast and the man made no attempt to fight it. It was that stillness, the absence of any ordinary panic in a person standing in a swollen ford, that turned the wheelwright's stomach. He drew back to the trees, and what he saw the figure do when the light went was the beginning of everything that followed. He did not run and he did not cry out, and afterwards the older hunters said that this was the first sign of the gift: the ability to hold quiet while another creature decided what it was. He was taken up by a small company of hunters who worked the Schuylkill and Delaware landings, and through them he came to the attention of the Proctor cousins of the White Ledger, who had settled in the Pennsylvania counties a generation earlier from Yorkshire by way of Virginia and the Quaker meetings. Slayers are ordinary people, and William's training was ordinary too: shooting until his shoulder was black, learning the signs of a house that had been visited, and studying the small rules of the dead. His long rifle was made by a Lancaster County gunsmith and he cast his own shot in a mould kept in the wheel shop, pouring silver melted from a broken spoon and two buttons. His craft was Procedural Trapping, which in his hands meant a method rather than a flourish. He believed no creature should be met in the open if it could be met in a place he had prepared for it, and he prepared places the way he built wheels, spoke by spoke, checking each against the last. A ford, a ferry landing or a covered cart-track would be measured, baited with an ordinary-looking cargo and watched for nights before anything was done. The name The Still Bridle came from an incident on the Schuylkill road that the ledger records only in outline. A drover's horse had been found standing untethered and unmarked in the middle of a lane where its owner had vanished, and William had led it, on a loose rein, to the mill where the missing man's killer was known to rest, waiting in the doorway while the animal walked in ahead of him without any pressure. The thing inside had come out for the horse. It was the sort of hunt he preferred: quiet, planned, and finished before the neighbours knew there had been one. The White Ledger credits him with a modest but steady number of entries over the following two decades, mostly along the river and its creeks, and the entries are notable for how seldom they mention injury to anyone on his own side. In 1737 he married Mary Lister, then twenty years old, a dairywoman from Bristol, Pennsylvania, and herself a vampire slayer, the daughter of the schoolmaster Norman Proctor Lister. Their courtship is one of the few things the Proctor women set down in a private letter that survives, and it is unromantic in the best way: they met over a body, agreed about what had done it, and disagreed cheerfully about how to prove it. They took a house near the river landing at Germantown with a wheel shop on one side and a milk house on the other, so that their working lives, one all wood and fire and the other all cold slate and scalded pails, lay across the same yard. Their first child, Isaac Kincaid Proctor, was born in 1738, a year after the wedding, and became a slayer of the same house. Their second, William Kincaid Proctor, was born in 1742 and did not answer the calling. He grew up to work in the shop and to keep the accounts, and his father seems to have valued him no less for it. The household ran on two tempos. William liked a plan and Mary liked to watch and wait, and the pairing suited the work: he would build the trap and she would sit in it. They hunted together on the Delaware through the late 1730s and 1740s, and the wars with France on the frontier, which pushed refugees and rumour down the river valleys from the 1750s, meant that they had strangers arriving on their landings at odd hours and a good many unexplained deaths in the wake of the fighting. William was too old for the militia by then and too useful in his own trade. Army wagons needed wheels, and the provincial commissaries paid promptly enough that he made a small sum of money from the war, which he put into more land. Mary died in 1750 of a fever caught in a plague house, and it was William who kept the shop and the boys going afterward, and who did not marry again. Neighbours remembered that he went on shrinking tires in the yard in the evenings, in the same ring of fire, though with less audience. The rivalry with the Faulkners touched him lightly. The Red Ledger's Massachusetts hunters did not often cross into the Pennsylvania river country, but the tallies were compared in letters carried by carters and packet captains, and William, who took no part in the family grievance over Towton and the Guest, kept his count honestly and let the ledger keepers argue. He is recorded as saying that a debt in a book was worth nothing to the dead. In later years he taught Isaac the craft and let him take the leading hand, and stayed on as a sort of surveyor of ground for the younger hunters, who found that a night spent walking a ford with him was better instruction than a season in the field. He was seventy-one when he died in 1782, thrown from a horse on a rutted road not far from the village where he was born, in a year when his younger son, William Kincaid Proctor, also died. The Revolution was drawing to its close and the roads were full of discharged soldiers and broken carts, and he had been out inspecting a wheel. He is buried in the Germantown ground. The White Ledger closes his entry with a plain line noting that he was a hand of no house who was worth two of many that had one, and the later Slayerverse chroniclers have kept The Still Bridle as an example of how a man from outside the bloodline could shape it, through a wife, two sons and a manner of hunting that the family still teaches.