Alianore Proctor

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

Alianore Proctor kept her accounts in a small, square, backward-leaning hand, and it is to that hand that the Proctors of Otley owe most of what is known about them. She was born in Otley in 1564, in Wharfedale, where the river Wharfe runs broad and brown under a stone bridge and the hump of the Chevin rises behind the town like the back of a sleeping animal. Otley belonged to the Archbishop of York, who kept a manor house there and drew rents from the market, and it was a small town of some two thousand souls: tanners, cordwainers, weavers, a few masons, an inn or two and a great many alehouses. On market days the streets were choked with drovers and carts, and the air smelled of sheep, leather and woodsmoke. It sat on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines, in the country of guildhalls, wool markets and the tall shadow of the minster at York, twenty miles off, whose authority reached even here. Her father was Theobald Proctor, born in 1542, who worked as a mason's apprentice, a status he held for far longer than most young men because he had come to the trade late, after years as a hod-carrier, and his master was in no hurry to let him go. He spent his days at the quarry and on the scaffold, cutting and dressing millstone grit for the walls that were going up across the dale, and he came home at night grey with dust, with hands that would not close properly and a cheerful temper. Her mother was Tiffany Wentworth, born in 1544, a dairymaid who had kept cows at a farm above the town before she married and who kept two of her own in a small shed at the back of the cottage. The Wentworths were a big Yorkshire name, and the mother liked to remember it, though her own branch was as poor as any. Alianore had a younger sister, Tiffany Proctor, born in 1568, named for their mother. The two girls slept in the same box bed and shared the same chores, but they were not alike. Alianore was watchful and tidy, with a quick head for sums; Tiffany was dreamy and easily distracted, and it fell to the elder to keep her out of the cows' way and the fire's. They were taught their letters by the curate, who had a little school in the vestry, and Alianore in particular took to reading and figures. By eleven she was helping a neighbour reckon his wool tallies, and by thirteen she was doing the same for half the street. Then, in 1579, her father died. It was an accident on the scaffold, or a fever after one, or a cough that went to the chest; the family accounts do not say, and Alianore never spoke of it. She was fifteen. The cottage could no longer be held on a mason's apprentice's wages that no longer existed, and for a while it seemed that the girls would be put out to service in different houses. Instead their mother took in washing and sold milk, and Alianore, who had a name in the street for honest reckoning, was taken on by a shopkeeper on the market square as a sort of clerk and counter-girl, at a wage of board and a few pence. The shop was the making of her. It was a narrow, two-storey building with a counter at the front and a store behind, selling everything from candles, soap and vinegar to pins, thread, dried fish and the coarse cloth the country people wore. There were no fixed prices for most things, and everything depended on the shopkeeper's eye, memory and credit. Alianore had all three. She learned to weigh, to measure, to tally, to chase a debt with a smile and to refuse credit without giving offence. She learned the price of tallow in a wet autumn and the price of sugar when the ships were late. Within a few years she was running the counter, and by her twenties the shop, in every practical way, was hers to run, with the shopkeeper content to sit by the fire and be called master. In the parish she came to be known as the shopkeeper's wife, a title that puzzled visitors, since no marriage was ever recorded in the register and the White Ledger notes her without a spouse. The neighbours settled the matter by using the name and asking no questions, as Yorkshire people will. She never had children. The family understood this as something like a private grief and did not press it. Her sister Tiffany kept a house not far off, and the young ones of the town were always in and out of the shop, sent for a farthing's worth of pins or a pennyworth of treacle. Alianore doled out sweets to them from a jar behind the counter and remembered every child's name and every child's mother's. It is likely that no woman in Otley was better informed about who owed what to whom, who was sick, who was courting and who was expecting, and she used that knowledge sparingly and, on the whole, kindly. The Proctor ledger touched her at one remove. She was not a slayer and made no claim to be, but she had grown up with the family stories of Walter Proctor and the White Ledger, of Towton and the vanished Guest, and she understood better than most what kind of world her cousins in York moved in. In the summer of 1588, when the Armada was expected and beacons were lit along the coast, she noticed that certain customers began buying more salt than they needed and asking, with elaborate casualness, for hawthorn twigs and silver thread. She sold them what they wanted and wrote it down. Her stock book for that summer, oddly, records the sale of forty-one candles in a week to a single man who did not sleep at home. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns tested her. When the sickness came up the dale in the 1600s, the shop was shuttered, the town was watched, and Alianore ran her business through the window, handing out bread and taking coins in vinegar. She survived it, as she survived her mother's death in 1604, and as she survived the cold winters that killed the old and the poor. She kept the shop until her sixties, then handed it on to a nephew and retired to the room above it, where she sat at the window with her accounts. She died in 1634, aged seventy, of a wasting illness that took her slowly over most of a year. The town buried her with more ceremony than a shopkeeper's wife might expect, and the shop closed for the day. Her account books passed to her sister's family and still contain, tucked into their bindings, a few pages of tallies that have nothing to do with wool or candles. The Slayerverse remembers Alianore Proctor as one of the Proctor women who kept the counters, the books and the confidences of the White Ledger, and the honest, backward-leaning hand that filled her ledgers is still quoted as the standard for careful accounting.