Alice Proctor

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

Alice Proctor made gloves for people who could not afford them and for people who could, and she was said to treat the two kinds of customer with the same exasperated care. She was born in 1499 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, the fifth child of Jeremy Proctor and Agnes Barlow, in the stone cottage on the fell above the market town. Her brother John Proctor was already eight, her sister Heloise Proctor seven, and her brother Ambrose Proctor four; her younger brother Nicholas Proctor would come in 1502. She grew up in the middle of a crowd, and learned early that the way to be heard in a house of six was to be exact. Her father kept sheep and her mother spun, so wool and leather were never far from her hands. As a girl she was set to the distaff like her sister, but she had little love for the thread. What she liked was the skin: the soft, close, pale grain of a lambskin, the way a good doeskin took a cut, the small hard satisfactions of a seam that lay flat. At eleven she was apprenticed, with her mother's quiet approval, to a glover at Wetherby, a widow who ran a bench near the market cross and who taught her the cutting, the stitching, the pricking of holes with a fine awl, the fitting of a fourchette between the fingers so that a hand could close without the glove binding. By fourteen she was cutting patterns on her own, and by sixteen the widow was admitting that her apprentice had the better eye. Glovers in her day were a respectable and slightly mysterious guild. They knew every kind of hand in a parish, the farmer's hard palm, the priest's soft one, the falconer's gauntlet-worn thumb, and they could tell a good deal about a man from the way he asked for a fit. Alice cultivated that knowledge as her mother had cultivated the spinner's attention to threads. She noticed who needed gloves in summer, who had bound their knuckles, who wore old gloves over fresh scratches, and who ordered a pair a size too large for a hand that seemed to be growing thinner. It was an observant trade, and the Proctors were an observant family, and in this at least she was her mother's daughter. She did not know, until she was twenty-one, that her mother was a vampire slayer. Agnes Barlow died in 1520, and at the graveside John laid a sealed ledger on the table and told his brothers and sisters what the family was. Alice listened with her hands folded and, like her brother Ambrose, found that it explained things she had half noticed all her life: the brass bell that rang when no one touched it, the nights the spindle turned in an empty room, her mother's wet skirts at dawn. She asked only whether she might see the book. John let her. She read the first entry, the one in Walter Proctor's hand from 1455, and the story of the Guest at Towton, and the account of the ledgers' two versions of that night, and she closed the volume and said, with a glover's practicality, that someone ought to write down who had actually been standing where. It was thirty years before the observation was acted on. She never forgot it. It was a miller's trade that brought her husband. Giles Armitage came to Wetherby market from Knaresborough with a dispute over a load of oats and a half-formed wish to buy gloves for his father, who had never owned any. Alice, who had a stall under the cross and sharp opinions on millers, sold him a pair of rabbit-skin mittens at a price he was not clever enough to haggle down. He came back the following week, and the week after, and in 1522, when she was twenty-three, they were married. She moved to the mill above the River Nidd, taking her knives, her wooden last and a bundle of doeskin, and set up a gloving bench in a corner of the miller's kitchen where the light came in over the wheel. Their children were Margery Armitage, born in 1523, and Piers Armitage, born in 1526, who became a slayer. Alice taught Margery her trade, and saw to it that her daughter had a hand that would feed her whatever the world did. Piers she watched. He was a quiet boy with his father's silences and her family's eyes, and when his calling came she did not forbid it; she sat with him for an evening and told him what she had learned from her mother, that the first rule of the work was to write down what you had seen before you had decided what it meant. She sewed him a pair of gloves for the hunt, lined with doeskin and cut for a hand that would need to grip a stake in the wet, and he wore them until they came to pieces. The years of the northern risings, 1536 and 1537, found her at the mill with her children small and her husband's trade under suspicion. Armies of all complexions passed along the road, and every party wanted gloves and flour. Alice made gloves for anyone who paid, rebel or royal, and kept a separate pocket in her apron for the names of the men she thought were the dangerous ones. It was a habit she shared with her brothers. John's work in those years took him through Knaresborough more than once, and she fed him in the miller's kitchen with an eye on the door, and told him, without being asked, which carters were talking too much. She was a woman of strong opinions and little patience for family pride. She considered the Faulkner rivalry a clerks' quarrel, and the lost matter of the Guest an argument that two houses had agreed to keep alive because it flattered them both. When Wars of the Roses stories were told at a Proctor table, she would interrupt to ask what the fighting had to do with the gloves, and the older Proctors, who had never been able to answer, took it as a mark of her seriousness. She also, more privately, kept her own small tally. Not a ledger of vampires, but a list, on the inside of a cupboard door, of every person who had come into the mill kitchen and gone out better for it. By the end of her life the door was black with entries. In 1555 her husband died, in an accident on the fells, and her brother Nicholas died within the same year, so that the end of that winter left her with two empty chairs. She stayed on at the mill, working the same bench, with Margery beside her and Piers coming and going on the hunt, and she did not mention the loss to anyone. The long years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, 1549 to 1560, gave her little to say; she had made gloves for three monarchs' worth of bishops and considered them all the same size. She grew thin in her sixties, her fingers stiff, her eyes failing, and she cut by touch what she had once cut by sight. She died in 1568, of a fever that came up the valley in the late summer and took several households with it, at the age of sixty-nine. She had been working a pair of children's gloves the night before. They were finished by Margery and buried with her, according to the family, because the pair was meant to be given away and no one else could be trusted to decide to whom. Alice Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the glover who watched hands and kept the small accounts of kindness, and as the one sister of the slayer family who asked, from the first, that the ledgers write down who had stood where. The White Ledger carries no tally against her name, but its later keepers took her cupboard door as a model for a different kind of entry. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet witness: the person who notices, remembers, and sews the thing together without ever being asked.