Anthony Proctor

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

Anthony Proctor was born in 1555 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and he died there in 1620 of a fever, a saddler who had never married and who left behind a shop full of well-hung leather and a reputation for the steadiest hands in the parish. He was the youngest child of Gilbert Proctor, a fuller, and Cecily Metcalfe, a chandler, and the younger brother of Lancelot Proctor, the vampire slayer known as The Cold Lantern, and of Dorothy Proctor, the baker. He grew up in a slayer family and chose, with some deliberation, to be the one in it who made things that lasted. His boyhood was spent in the house near the bridge, in the loft above the kitchen where the smells of the mill and the chandler's pots came up through the boards. He was the baby and the quiet one, and his elder brother and sister, who were so much older, treated him as a sort of household pet who happened to be able to speak. Dorothy minded him when he was small; Lancelot taught him his letters from the margins of other people's deeds. He was a slight, dark-haired child with a way of watching a task for a long time before touching it. Their father, who had begun to notice his hands, set him at ten to the fulling shears, the great two-handled blades with which a fuller trims the nap of a cloth, and was surprised to find the boy could keep the cut level across a whole length. Anthony liked the shears well enough. What he liked better was the neighbouring saddler's shop, where on a hundred wet afternoons he stood in the doorway smelling leather and watching an old man stitch. The saddler took him on at thirteen. It was a craft of a hundred small disciplines. Leather had to be chosen, cut, skived thin at the edges, damped, stretched over the tree, stitched with waxed thread through holes punched in an exact line, and finally burnished until it shone like a chestnut. A saddle was a thing that a man sat on all day for years, and a bad stitch showed itself in a galled horse and a sore rider and a bitter word at the next fair. Anthony learned to take his time. His master, a wheezing, patient man who talked more to the leather than to the boy, taught him to feel through a hide with his thumbs for the thin places and the old scars, and to read in a skin the life of the beast it had come from. He found he could tell, from a hide, whether the cow had been well kept. He found it a very satisfying thing to know. He was fourteen when the rising of the northern earls passed through the country around Wetherby in the winter of 1569, and what he remembered of it was the horses. Every party that came through wanted harness mended, and the saddler's shop stood open to riders of both sides, who paid in coin or in promises. His master sewed for anyone who set a coin on the bench and asked no questions about which cause it was; Anthony stitched a rebel's girth one afternoon and a loyalist's stirrup-leather the next, and thought afterwards that the leather had no politics. He kept that thought for life. He said that a good saddle was a neutral country, and the family, who had an old and complicated history of loyalties in the Wars of the Roses, found it a useful phrase. By his twenties he had a shop of his own on the lane that ran down from the market place, with a bench under the window, a row of lasts and trees along the wall, and a sign, painted by his sister, of a sleeping horse in a blue saddle. He made saddles, bridles, girths, panniers and the long drovers' belts that carry a man's coin and knife. He made, for the family, a good deal more. The slayers of the White Ledger needed leather that could carry weight without creaking: a stake-case that sat flat against the ribs, a pistol-holster cut so that the matchlock could be drawn in one motion without catching the cord, a long coat lined with an inner pocket in oiled hide. His brother Lancelot, who had no talent for the needlework, brought him the problems and he solved them with a shrug and a week of evenings. Some of the stake-cases that the Proctors used into the next century still bore his small mark, a pair of crossed awls under a sprig of hawthorn, pressed into the corner with a heated iron. He never married. The family said afterwards that it was nothing sad, though neighbours had their theories. He was courteous to every woman in Wetherby and in love with none of them, and he gave up asking himself the question around the time that he reached thirty and found that the shop and the house were enough. He ate his dinner at his sister's table on Sundays and at his brother's on Wednesdays, took a quiet pleasure in the nieces and nephews who spent their afternoons under his bench, and kept a small, clean, rather silent house with a cat and a collection of old awls. Those who knew him well said he was the most contented man in the lane, and the least talkative. The summer of 1588 brought the beacons and the Armada fear, and Anthony, who had never held a pistol, found himself with a different job. Gentlemen of the district were arming their tenants with whatever they could find, and in a week he mended or made seventeen sets of harness for the muster, working through the nights by the light of candles from his mother's stock. He did not go to the beacon. He sat at the bench and sewed, and he later said that if the Spaniards had landed they would have found the Wetherby horses very well strapped. In the same season he carried a stake-case to his brother on the hill, unasked, and stayed with the watch until the dawn, holding a lantern. It was as near as he came to the front line of the work, and he was not sorry to have missed the rest. Anthony had views on the Guest and the long grievance with the Faulkners of Lancashire, but they were short. A man who spends his days repairing what other people break has little patience for a quarrel that cannot be mended, and the Towton entry, which said a Lancastrian had let a vampire through the lines in 1461, seemed to him a hole in a seam that two families had been picking at for a century. He thought it should be left alone or stitched properly, and since he could not do the second he kept to the first. He told his niece once that every feud is a worn girth: it holds until the day it does not. The years of the early Stuart reigns were hard for a saddler, with plague restrictions closing the roads and the winters killing horses by the dozen, but he kept working, and when the work thinned he mended the doors, the pails and the shoes of his neighbours for nothing. He outlived both his parents and his elder brother and, by four years, his sister. In 1620, in the spring, he caught a fever on the road to Tadcaster, where he had gone to deliver a saddle he would not trust to a carrier, and it took him in a week. He was sixty-five. The saddle was delivered by a neighbour. The shop was shut for a day and then, on the family's instruction, left open for a week so that anyone who owed him anything could come and look at what he had left. Anthony Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the saddler whose work held, the one who never married and never wavered, and whose crossed awls and hawthorn mark were found on the gear of hunters for the best part of a century. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen of the White Ledger tradition, the unsung makers whose patient stitching kept a slayer's stakes close, a pistol clear of its holster and a coat from catching, and for the principle that something made well enough is a kind of protection in itself.