Anne Proctor

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

Leeds in the year that Anne Proctor was born, 1541, was a busy, muddy, cloth-smelling town of perhaps three thousand people, its streets running down to the river Aire and the long stone bridge where the carts jostled to reach the markets. The trade of the place was woollen cloth, made by householders in hundreds of cottages and sold each week to the merchants who set up their trestles along the Briggate. In that economy the spinning wheel was as ordinary as the cooking pot, and a girl born into a family with a mother who brewed ale and a father who worked in stone grew up surrounded by things being made, sold and argued over. Her mother was Parnel Proctor, a brewster, and it was Parnel's name that the family kept in the ledger, since the Proctors by custom let a daughter carry the line. Parnel brewed for the neighbourhood in a lean-to at the back of a rented house, and the smell of boiled malt and wet hops hung in Anne's hair through childhood. Her father, Guy Tempest, born in 1517, was a mason's apprentice, still bound to a master well into his twenties because the building trades of the time kept men in tutelage long past boyhood; he worked on the tall parish church and on the town's new houses of stone and timber. Anne's younger brother Theobald Proctor followed in 1542, and the two children were raised close together, with the peculiar loyalty of siblings who shared a bed under the eaves and a brewhouse in the yard. Guy Tempest died in 1552, when Anne was eleven and Theobald ten, leaving Parnel to keep the household on ale money and whatever the children could earn. That was the hinge of Anne's girlhood. She went to work with wool, first carding for a neighbour and then, when her fingers were trained, at the wheel. Spinning in the sixteenth century was done by the distaff and drop spindle or by the new great and small wheels, and a fast spinner could earn a few pence a week that made the difference between a full and an empty pot. Anne became a fast spinner. Neighbours said she could spin and talk and watch the door all at once, and that the thread she made was so even the clothiers asked for her by name. She learned early the difference between wool of good staple and wool of poor, and she developed a merchant's eye for who was cheating whom. Religion and politics pressed on the household without asking. Anne was a child when Edward's reformers whitewashed the frescoes in the churches, a girl of twelve when Mary brought back the candles and Latin, and a young woman of seventeen when Elizabeth reversed the tide again. Parnel kept to a cautious, unshowy faith and told her children to attend whatever service the law required and to keep their opinions for the dark. Anne inherited that discretion and it served her. When the northern earls rose in 1569, Yorkshire was full of soldiers and rumours, and Anne, by then twenty-eight, watched the mustering of gentlemen's tenants along the Wharfe, then the quiet aftermath, when the queen's justices hanged men in villages throughout the county and the cloth trade froze. She said years later that the worst of it was not the gallows but the silence in the market. The Proctors kept the White Ledger, and Anne understood the family business in the way that women of the house understood it, as work that was done and not discussed at table. The ledger was a Yorkist tally, begun by Walter Proctor in 1455 in the years of the Wars of the Roses, and it recorded the vampires taken by Proctor hands. Anne was not a slayer, but she was an unfailing reader of small signs. She noticed, through the wool trade, which farms lost stock and which carters refused certain roads after dark. She noticed the pallor of some visitors and the reluctance of others to enter a house without an invitation. Parnel and later Anne kept these observations in their heads, and passed the important ones to Proctor kinsmen who did the hunting. It was slow, unpaid, vital work, and Anne was good at it. In 1564 she married Dennis Nowell, a drover out of Skipton, four years her junior. The match was practical and, to the surprise of neighbours, happy. Dennis spent much of every year on the road, walking herds of black cattle down from the dales and the Scottish border to the fairs and the slaughterhouses of the south, and returning to Leeds with news, a few coins and the smell of wet drovers' coats. Anne kept the house and the wheel. They had two daughters: Odelina Proctor, born in 1567, and Mary Proctor, born in 1568. Anne insisted, as her mother had before her, that the girls carry the Proctor name, and Dennis, who set no store by such things, agreed at the font. The house in Leeds was two rooms, a loft and a yard; the girls slept on a straw mattress near the fire and spun as soon as they could sit at the wheel. Odelina grew into a practical, watchful child who would live to sixty-three. Mary, born a year later, was another matter, restless and quick, with a disconcerting way of standing quite still and watching a dark corner until it gave itself up. Anne saw very early what Mary was, and she quietly arranged for Proctor cousins to teach the girl the family's work, the methods of tracking and the ways of striking, though Mary's calling as a vampire slayer did not fully declare itself until she was grown. Anne was proud of it and afraid of it at once. She lived to see her younger daughter begin her work, and the ledger keepers record that she was the one who packed Mary's food and salt and made her carry a spare cap. Anne Proctor died in 1582, aged forty-one, thrown from a horse on the road out of Leeds. She had borrowed the animal to reach Dennis's return at a fair, and it took fright at something on the road, or, as her daughter later half-believed, at something that was not on the road at all. She was buried in the churchyard at Leeds, and Dennis, who outlived her by twenty-four years, kept her spinning wheel in the corner until his own death in 1606. Her mother Parnel died the same year as her, in 1582, and the family remembered it as the winter both the women of the house were taken. The ledgers record Anne's name in the margin, the only mark being the words "a good eye," and the family's sense of her is of a woman whose thread and whose attention were equally fine. Within the Slayerverse she is one of those figures who show how the White Ledger was fed by watchful households, and how a spinner with a keen memory could keep a whole city's dangers in her head.