Agatha Proctor grew and dried and pounded the plants that the people of York took when they were ill, and she did it for the better part of five decades without ever marrying. She was born in 1579 in York, Yorkshire, and she died there in 1633, of old age, at fifty-four, which in her time and trade counted as a full life. Though she was not a hunter, she was a Proctor of the White Ledger, and the herbs that she gathered, dried and sold turned out to matter a great deal to the family's other work.
York in the years of her youth was the second city of the kingdom in all but wealth, a walled place of narrow streets, timber-framed houses and the enormous bulk of the Minster over everything. The city had been a seat of the Council of the North for a generation, and the coaching roads that ran up from London to Scotland converged at its gates, so that the inns of Micklegate and Bootham were never quiet. The old trades were declining, the cloth business had drifted to Leeds and Halifax, and the city lived on its courts, its clergy, its markets and its travellers. Fire, flood on the Ouse and periodic plague were the constant hazards. Agatha was born in the year after an outbreak that the old people of the parish talked about for decades, and her earliest memories were of vinegar-soaked cloths and shuttered doors.
Her father was Kit Proctor, a yeoman who farmed a holding outside the walls and sold his produce at the Thursday market. Her mother was Rohese Stansfield, a dairywoman with a strong forearm and a fondness for salted butter and sharp bargains. Kit was born in 1560 and Rohese in 1561, and they married young, so that Agatha grew up in a household whose rhythms were those of the cows and the seasons. She had one sibling, a brother, Guy Proctor, born in 1583, four years her junior, and she looked after him as much as her mother did. It was a hardworking family, and neither parent expected a daughter to sit idle.
What set her apart was her attention. As a girl she followed her mother across the pastures and learned the names of the plants that grew at the field's edge: comfrey for bruises, yarrow for cuts, feverfew and betony for headaches, the pale flowers of elder for colds, the woolly leaves of mullein for coughs. A neighbouring widow, a woman who had once served in a great house as a still-room maid, taught her to distil, infuse and make salve, and gave her a book of remedies copied in a secretary hand. Agatha read it with a persistence that surprised her mother, and by her twenties she had begun to set up as an herbalist in her own right, selling by the ounce from a stall and a small room on a lane off the Shambles.
The practice of the day was a mixture of the sound and the doubtful. Herbalists of the time drew on the tradition of Gerard's Herball and the older Galenic texts, in which every plant had a temperament and a planet, and they treated disease by balancing the four humours. Agatha kept the observation and skipped much of the astrology. She grew what she could in a walled patch behind the house, where rue, hyssop, thyme, sage and southernwood mingled with borage and calendula, and she gathered the rest from the riverbanks and the wet fields beyond the Ouse. She dried it on racks in the loft and ground it in a brass mortar, and her bundles hung from every beam of the workroom like a flock of small brown bats.
Her customers came from all over the city: carters with strained backs, laundresses with cracked hands, clerks with weak chests, and the wives of respectable tradesmen who did not wish to be seen at the apothecary's. She was tall and spare and wore a grey wool gown and a linen coif, with a leather apron stained by years of green juice. Those who knew her described a shrewd, dry, watchful person who asked a great many questions and gave short answers. She did not pretend to cures she could not effect, and in a profession full of showmen, that counted for a good deal.
The White Ledger's work was known to her from childhood, since the Proctors were a family of yeomen and tradespeople who kept the tally of vampires taken on the Yorkist side, reaching back to the founder, Walter Proctor, in 1455. She was not called, and she knew it early, but she made herself useful. In the plague years, when York's authorities shut infected houses and watchmen guarded them, hunters who came back from a cellar with wounds needed a discreet healer who would ask no questions and keep no record. Agatha dressed wounds with poultices of comfrey and honey, sewed gashes with silk, and sat up with fevers. She discovered, as many in the family had before her, that certain herbs seemed to steady the sick who had been bitten, and she wrote her observations in a small notebook, which was later copied into the White Ledger's papers.
Her relation to the rivalry with the Faulkners of Lancashire was that of a well-informed bystander. She had heard the tale of the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461, every year since childhood, and she had a shrewd view of how much of it was history and how much of it was pride. She thought the Lancastrian side could hardly be entirely to blame, and she said so, to the irritation of some cousins, but she said it in the same voice in which she gave dosages, and it was difficult to argue with. She kept up a courteous correspondence with a Lancashire woman whose name is lost, swapping recipes for a cough syrup.
She never married. There were offers, one from a widowed tanner and one from a clerk at the Minster, but she turned them down in a few words and went on tending her patch. Her brother Guy, in later years, took over a portion of the family holding, and his children helped her in the garden. Her father Kit died in 1614 and her mother Rohese in 1610, and she carried on with the house and the business through the hard winters of the early Stuart years, when the Ouse froze and the price of coal doubled. She kept a rota of neighbours who needed firewood, and she kept the list in her head.
Agatha Proctor died in 1633 in York, of old age, at fifty-four. Her notebook of remedies passed to her family, and a copy stayed among the papers of the White Ledger for generations. She had no children, and she is not entered in the ledger under any tally, but in the tradition of the Slayerverse she is remembered as the herbalist of the House of Proctor, the woman who mended the hunters and who grew, in her walled garden by the Ouse, half of what the White Ledger needed to keep its people alive.
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