Avice Proctor

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

Avice Proctor was born in 1664 in York, Yorkshire, in a narrow house within sight of the Minster, and she spent her whole life in the noise and traffic of that city. York in the years after the Restoration was a shrunken and proud place, the old capital of the North, its walls and bars still standing, its merchants trading in lead, coal and cloth down the Ouse, and its streets crowded on market days with carriers, drovers and gentlefolk in from the Vale. It was a city of coaching inns and shopfronts, of cobbled Stonegate and the stink of the Shambles, and the girl who grew up there learned to bargain, to keep her voice level and to know the value of a full shelf. Her father, Roland Proctor, was a clerk in a solicitor's office and, at the same time, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, known among the Proctors by the alias The Quiet Bell. He was nineteen when she was born, a lean and unhurried young man with ink on his fingers, and the alias came, so the family said, from his habit of making no sound at all until the moment it mattered. He worked his days over deeds and conveyances in a chamber off Coney Street and his nights in the lanes and church-yards of the city and the road to Tadcaster. The tally he kept in the White Ledger was small but exact, and it was said of him that he never entered a vampire he had not seen dead. His wife, Clemence Kershaw, was a dairywoman from the country round Easingwold, who brought butter and cheese to York on the back of a pony every week and had married Roland in the year he took his post. She was an early riser and a hard bargainer and she passed both traits to her daughter. The household was crowded and modest: three rooms above a chandler's on a lane near the Minster Yard, a little garden behind, and the smell of milk from the dairywoman's churns in the passage. Avice was a bright, watchful child with her father's stillness and her mother's speed. Her brother Roland Kershaw Proctor was born in 1667, when she was three, and the two were raised in the habit, common in the Proctor house, of taking the mother's name as a middle name and the father's as a surname. Roland Kershaw was not called; neither was Avice, and the two children grew up understanding that their father's other work was not to be spoken of to the neighbours, nor to their friends, nor at school. She learned to say that he worked late at the office, and she learned to say it without a flicker. She was taught her letters at a dame school and her accounts by her father, who set her small sums of pence and farthings across the table each night and would not let her leave the table until she had them right. By twelve she could keep a shop book. By fourteen she was working in the shop of a York grocer and tobacconist on Stonegate, weighing tea, sugar and raisins, wrapping candles, and learning the difficult art of extending credit without insulting a customer. It was a good place to learn: York's gentry, clergy and officers came through the door, and a shop-girl who listened heard the whole of the city's gossip before the rest of the city did. The family's grief of that decade was the death of her mother. Clemence died in 1682, when Avice was eighteen and her brother fifteen, of a fever that swept the crowded lanes that summer, and the household lost its warmest member. Roland, thirty-seven and a widower, went on with his double life, but the house was quieter. Avice took charge of the kitchen, the accounts and her brother, and in time she also took on a part of her father's other business. The White Ledger, in the Proctor household, was written by more than one hand, and Roland taught his daughter to copy the entries fair and to keep the household's supply of clean paper. She was never called, but she came to know the ledger's contents better than a great many hunters did. Her position in later life is described in the family papers in the phrase that the Proctors used for her, a shopkeeper's wife, a description that stood in for a longer arrangement. She kept the counter of the Stonegate shop for many years, running it in the name of the proprietor with a firm and exact hand, and the ledger clerks noted her as the wife of the shop, meaning the person on whom it depended. She had no children of her own, and the family record does not name any husband; what it does record is that she managed the business from the age of thirty and that the shelves were never bare. Trade in York was slow after the Glorious Revolution, when the court and its custom moved south and the Assizes were reduced, but the shop held its clientele of clergy, lawyers and cathedral canons, and Avice kept it in the black. The shop was also a useful post. A grocer's counter in a coaching city sees everybody, and Avice, with her father's stillness, learned to notice the customer who bought no bread, the man who came at dusk for tallow and never at noon, the stranger who counted his change twice. She passed what she saw to Roland, who passed it on to the ledger, and it was said that an entry in the White Ledger between 1690 and 1707 with the words "by report of the shop" beside it had come from her. In 1688, when the northern gentry rose for William of Orange and the Earl of Danby seized the city, she kept the shutters open, sold every candle she had, and noted the price of powder. Her father took the occasion to be out for three nights; on the fourth he returned and said only that the streets had been noisy. Roland, The Quiet Bell, died in 1707 at the age of sixty-two, and Avice was forty-three. She buried him in the parish churchyard, closed the shop for one day and reopened it on the next. Her brother, who worked as a clerk in his turn, moved into the rooms above, and the two of them kept house together through the rest of her life. In the autumn of 1715, when the first Jacobite rising moved down through the north and York stood in fear of a rebel column, she stacked the shelves against a possible siege, and the city, in the end, saw nothing but the hurried departure of a few gentlemen. She wrote in her account-book that the alarm had cost her a great deal of flour. In 1723 she was called out to a niece's lying-in, in a house across the Ouse, as she had once been called out to nothing in her own life, and there she took the childbed fever that ran through the room, and died of it that winter at the age of fifty-nine. The White Ledger records the burial in a single line and adds beneath it the words that the shop was shut for the day. Avice Proctor is remembered in the Slayerverse as a daughter of The Quiet Bell who never took up a stake but who kept the White Ledger's counter, its paper and its eyes for more than forty years, and the Proctors of York still speak of her as the woman who never let a shelf go empty.