Clemence Thwaites

Spouse of Walter Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Every laundress in Ripon knew the stretch of the River Skell below the minster wall where the water ran shallow over flat stones, and by the time she was ten years old Clemence Thwaites knew it better than most. She was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, in 1431, into a household that lived by other people's dirt. Her mother took in washing from the canons and the better-off townsfolk, and the girl carried the baskets, beat the linen on the stones with a wooden bat, and learned to make lye from wood ash and to gather soapwort along the river bank. Nobody set down her parents' names, and later records say only that she came from the wash-houses by the bridge. The trade was hard, wet, and cold for half the year, and it taught her a talent for reading a stranger's life from what came out of his shirts. Ripon in those years was a small but important place. It was a minster town, with a great church served by a college of canons, a market square where the wakeman blew a horn each evening at nine o'clock to set the watch, and a trade in wool, cloth and the spurs that the town was known for. Streets of timber-framed houses leaned toward each other above the cobbles. In winter the smoke of a hundred hearths hung under a grey sky, and the smell of tallow and wet wool never quite left the air. A laundress in such a place saw everything. She was let into kitchens, sculleries and bedchambers, and she carried news from house to house as she carried linen. Clemence became famous for two things: bleaching a surplice until it was white as the frost, and forgetting, with absolute discipline, whatever she had seen while doing it. She was tall and raw-boned, with red hands that she was vain about in a small way, keeping them rubbed with mutton fat and beeswax on Sundays. She was not quick to laugh, but when she did the whole yard heard it. She held strong opinions about the sanctity of contracts and the slyness of clergymen, and she sang, when she worked, in a low steady voice that carried across the water. The women who washed beside her said that she could not be lied to, which was true; and that she never repeated what she knew, which was truer still. It was this second quality that eventually brought her a husband. Walter Proctor, born the same year as she was, was a York clerk trained in law, oath-taking and the keeping of accounts. He first came to Ripon on a legal errand for a chapter of canons, and it was in the ordinary course of business that his good linen went to the Skell to be washed. Clemence returned it with a sharp note that his collar had been mended twice by the same clumsy hand and that he ought to find himself a wife. He laughed, kept the note, and came back the following spring. They were married in 1460, when she was twenty-nine, which was late for a woman of her rank, and they set up house in York, in a narrow timber-framed building near the minster close where a clerk could hear the bells and a laundress could hang her sheets in a yard. The rest of Walter's life was not spoken of at first. He was, she discovered within months, a vampire slayer, and the accounts he kept so carefully were not for canons alone; they were for the White Ledger, which he and his friends had begun in 1455. A less practical woman might have been shaken by the revelation. Clemence asked only to see the ledger, and after reading a page she told him that his columns were badly laid out and that a slayer who lost track of his own tally would be robbed by whoever came to count it. It was the beginning of a partnership that lasted twenty-six years. She never touched a stake and never went out on a hunt, but she washed the blood from his coats, learned which stains came out of wool with cold water and which needed salt, and could tell from the condition of a returned garment what kind of night he had had. Their children were born into the tension of the times. Isabel Proctor arrived in 1462, a year after the killing frost of Towton, when the York streets were still full of people talking of the dead and of the vampire the family would later call only the Guest. Jeremy Proctor followed in 1465, and Clemence Proctor, called after her mother and carrying the same long jaw, in 1466. She raised all three with the same firm hand she used on linen. Isabel learned Latin numerals and the elements of law from her father and the elements of cleanliness from her mother; Jeremy, a quiet boy who preferred animals to books, was allowed to go out to his mother's cousins on the fells; the younger Clemence was sent to a dairy farm outside the city as soon as she was strong enough to carry a pail. Clemence Thwaites never forced her children into the family's other trade, though she quietly made sure they could all handle a knife, a lantern and a secret. For twenty-six years the household was steady. Walter went out at night and came back at dawn, and she was waiting with hot water and a clean shirt. She learned to read the signs of what he did not say, and to keep the neighbours' curiosity at bay with the plain excuse of clerks' hours and late accounts. She was the person other Yorkshire slayers' wives came to, in the years when the White Ledger's hunters gathered in York, and it was in her kitchen that a quarrel between two of them about a tally was settled over bread and small beer. The rivalry with the Lancastrian side was, for her, a question of arithmetic and pride rather than of hatred, and she distrusted anyone who described it otherwise. The year after Bosworth, when Richard's fall had left York shaken and sullen and the new king's men were beginning to visit the city, was the year of both the wedding and the funeral. In January 1486 Isabel married Thomas Faulkner, joining the two houses that had spent a generation counting each other's failures, and Clemence sat through the wedding in her best gown without ever quite forgiving the Lancashire family for what its ledger implied about the Guest. Walter died later that same year, and she was left a widow within months of watching her daughter change her name in the minster, and it took her a long while to see that the marriage might turn out well. In the years that followed, the two roses were joined, and neither house forgave the other; she recognised the pattern from every quarrel over a torn sheet or a disputed farthing she had ever settled. She lived on in York another fourteen years, taking in a little laundry, tending her garden of soapwort and herbs, and watching the household thin around her. Her daughter Clemence died in the spring of 1500, and Thwaites herself died in the same year, of childbed, at sixty-nine, the fever taking her after she had gone out to help with a neighbour's lying-in, which she had done for others all her life. Her son Jeremy was on the fells when word reached him and rode down to bury her beside Walter. She left a small store of linen, a bat worn smooth by the water and a place in the White Ledger unlike any other: a margin entry in Walter's hand which says only that the clean linen was hers. In the modern Slayerverse, Proctor descendants still use the phrase to describe the quiet labour behind every recorded hunt, and they say it in her voice.