Jeremy Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Jeremy Proctor was the one child of the White Clerk who never learned to like a ledger, and he spent seventy years apparently unbothered by the fact. He was born in 1465 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, in the middle of a decade when his father Walter Proctor, a York clerk trained in law, oath-taking and the keeping of accounts, was moving between the city and the market towns on the business of the Yorkist cause. His mother was Clemence Thwaites, the laundress from Ripon, and he had an elder sister, Isabel Proctor, born in 1462, and a younger sister, Clemence Proctor, born in 1466. Jeremy was the middle child and behaved like one: watchful, self-sufficient, and a little apart. Wetherby, when he was born, was a modest market town on the River Wharfe, where the Great North Road crossed the water by a stone bridge that the local people were proud of and the carters cursed. It stood on the boundary between the farmland of the Vale of York and the rising country of the dales, and the wool that came down from the fells passed through its market before going on to York. There were three or four inns, a chapel, the rambling ruins of an old Templar holding, and a good deal of mud. The family kept a small place there for some years while Walter worked, and although they later lived chiefly in York, the boy spent long summers with his mother's cousins on the hills above the town, and it was there, rather than at his father's desk, that he found what he wanted from life. He wanted to be with sheep. It is hard to say why; the family put it down to temperament. At six he could tell every ewe on the hillside apart by her face, and at ten he was being paid a few pence a season to mind a neighbour's flock. He learned the fell shepherd's craft the way other children learned prayers: the lambing in a cold April, with a lantern and a bottle of warm milk in a pocket; the summer shearing, done with hand-shears at a stone pen; the dipping, the counting, the marking with red raddle, the constant watch for the stray dogs of the dales and the sheep-stealers who came at dusk. He knew the weather by the colour of the ridge. He loved the silence. He was slight and wiry, weather-tanned, with a habit of talking to dogs rather than people, and he carried a crook cut from ash and a battered wooden pipe whose sound the flock knew. His father, who had hoped for a clerk, did not press him. Walter, who had a quiet suspicion that the ledgers were not a kind inheritance, let his son go. Jeremy's mother approved; she reckoned that a boy who could count sheep would not be starved, and she wanted at least one of her children well away from the smell of blood in the kitchen. He was thus the only child of Walter and Clemence not to be raised in the routines of the White Ledger. He never became a slayer, never kept a tally, and never took up a stake. Yet the family did not exile him. On the contrary, the fells were a useful place to have a kinsman. He knew where a stranger would leave a track in the heather, which barns were empty, which byres smelled wrong. Through his early twenties he passed on such observations casually, as shepherds do, and slayers who needed a bed for the night found his hut open. He grew up through a time of upheaval. The Wars of the Roses were, for his father's world, the great fact of the age, but on the fells they were mostly a matter of rumours, of tax collectors and of the sudden need to hide flocks when soldiers marched through. He was twenty in 1485 when Richard fell at Bosworth, and twenty-one when his father died in 1486. He came down to York for the funeral in a borrowed coat and went straight back to the hills. He had seen his sister Isabel marry Thomas Faulkner earlier in that same year and knew that something had shifted, a merging of the two houses that neither ledger could easily digest. He thought of it in shepherd's terms: two flocks that had grazed beside a wall for thirty years being driven into the same pen, and neither dog trusting the other. In 1488 he married Agnes Barlow, a spinner from Richmond in the North Riding, whom he had met at a wool fair, and whom he discovered to be, after the wedding, a slayer herself. It was, he used to say, the one occasion when a secret had been kept from him and he was not offended. She had been called two years earlier, and she carried a bow and a sealed ledger as easily as he carried a crook. They set up house in a stone cottage on the edge of a fell above Wetherby, with a byre and a small croft, and she spun wool at the fire while he came in from the moor. Their children were John Proctor, born 1491, who became a slayer, and Heloise Proctor, born in 1492, who did not. Jeremy raised them the way he raised lambs, with unfussy attention and a kind of watchfulness; he taught John the hills as well as his mother taught him the bow, and taught Heloise to spin, sing and count. The household was an unusual one. It was a hillside farm that doubled as a place of watching. Agnes went out on the marsh and the moor at night, in the manner of her Detective's trade, and Jeremy, who kept the fell, gave her the lie of the land. Some of their best tallies came from what he saw on the hill: a set of hoof-prints that did not match any flock, a dog that would not cross a ridge. He never claimed credit. When a Lancastrian hunter, from Thomas Faulkner's side, wandered onto the fell in 1497 and was found by Jeremy in a snowdrift with a broken ankle, he brought him in, fed him, and bound the leg, and did not ask the man his name until he had finished. Neither Ledger records the episode; the family tells it because it seemed to them the proper way for the rivalry to conduct itself. The year of Flodden, 1513, when the northern parishes gave up their men to the marching armies, he was forty-eight, too old and too far up the fell for the muster, and the flocks kept him occupied through the anxious autumn. He counted the returning survivors along the road for weeks after. In 1520 his wife died after a long night on the marsh, and he found himself alone in the cottage with a wheel that no longer turned. It was a hard loss. He put her bow and her sealed ledger above the hearth and continued with the sheep, a little more slowly. John, then twenty-nine and a hunter in his own right, came often to help with the flock, and Heloise, who was twenty-eight, visited each week. He lasted another fourteen years. On the fell each winter he grew more stooped and quieter, telling the dogs what he could no longer tell people, and in the hard cold of early 1534 a winter cough settled on his chest and did not leave. He died that season at sixty-nine, in his own bed, with the ash crook against the wall. He was buried in the parish yard at Wetherby with his wife's spindle and his own pipe. The White Ledger does not have a tally against his name, and it has no entry for him at all in its first pages; but a later keeper wrote in the margin that the fells had been watched for fifty years by a man who never carried a stake. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the Proctor who chose the hill, and whose choice made the hill safe.