Bartholomew Proctor

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

Bartholomew Proctor was twenty-nine years old and still an apprentice when he died, which in the ordinary run of things would be a sad little fact and in his case is a rather proud one, because the delay was his own doing. He was born in 1615 in York, in Yorkshire, the youngest child of the apothecary Gervase Proctor and the draper Judith Ripley, in a Proctor household that was a slayer family under its shop signs, and he died in 1644 of the siege of York, with a pen in the drawer and a half-copied page on the desk. He never married and had no children. He is remembered as the family's youngest scribe and the only member of his generation who tried to write the quarrel with the Faulkners down fairly. He grew up in the double house in Petergate, with the apothecary's counter at the back and the draper's stall at the front, and the sense of being the last arrival in a household already full of competence. His brother Lambert Proctor, born in 1608, was seven years older and already watching the world with unnerving attention. His sister Hester Proctor, born in 1612, was three years older and had more opinions than he did. Bartholomew was the dreamer, a round-faced boy who was forever found on the stairs with a slate, copying out the labels from his father's jars or the prices from his mother's tickets. His handwriting was the first sign of what he was. At six he wrote his name with a flourish. At ten he wrote it in four scripts. His mother said it was the only extravagance in the house that paid for itself. He was shown the White Ledger by his father at twelve, and he read it as other boys read ballads. The great quarrel was in it: the entry for Towton in 1461, the vampire the family called the Guest, the claim that a Lancastrian slayer had let it slip through the lines, and the counter-claim in the Faulkners' Red Ledger that a Proctor had done the same. Bartholomew spent the best part of a winter trying to reconcile the two. He wrote out the White Ledger's account in one column and imagined the Red Ledger's in another, and he arrived, as every careful reader before him had arrived, at the conclusion that the Wars of the Roses had left two honest families with two honest memories and no witness. He did not mind that. He thought the interest lay in how each family had told the story, and he began, quietly, to keep notes on the telling. His father had meant him for the shop, but the shop did not have him. Gervase noticed that the labels were beautiful and the sums sometimes wrong, and after a long discussion with Judith in the kitchen the decision was taken that the boy should be bound to a scrivener instead. It was a sensible choice. The legal and commercial life of York ran on copied documents, and a good scrivener could find work in any corner of it. But the binding came late, and not by accident. Bartholomew had insisted on spending his teens helping his father, and then a long season helping his brother with errands he was not supposed to ask about, and by the time he was indentured to a scrivener near the Minster he was in his twenties and the term ran on. He accepted the delay with good humour. He liked being useful at home. The work suited him. In the scrivener's office he learned to cut a quill, to rule a margin, to engross a deed in the formal hands, to write a fair copy of a will without altering a comma, and to be silent about whose will it was. The master, a dry, kindly man, thought him the neatest hand he had trained, and gave him the copying of the delicate documents, the ones that had to be unobtrusive. Bartholomew carried that discipline home. In the evenings, after the shop was shut, he sat at the kitchen table and copied the older sections of the White Ledger onto clean paper, a second set to go in a different place, since the first was ageing and the family had begun to understand that no book is safe in a city that may be besieged. He was, for all his scholarship, no coward. Lambert, who knew the family's night business better than anyone, trusted him with small tasks: carrying a sealed packet across the city, watching a door from the upper window of a printer's, memorising the faces of the people who entered a house between dusk and midnight. Bartholomew was not called, and he did not expect to be, but he felt that a family which asked this much of one of its members should be able to ask something of the others. His brother recognised it. They became, in their late twenties, closer than they had been as boys, the quiet slayer and the quiet scribe, working in the evenings in the room above the shop with a candle and a pair of ledgers between them. The civil wars, which split the northern gentry, were hard on a scrivener. Half of York's customers had business that could not be written down in a time of suspicion, and the other half wrote nothing but petitions. He took the work that came, copied letters for officers, drew up passes, wrote out lists of billeted men and was careful to keep his sympathies out of his hand. He had no great liking for either cause. He wanted, he told his sister, to see the city come through with its documents intact. It was, he thought, the real treasure of York: not the walls but the paper. When the siege began in April 1644 he took his copying out of the office and into the house, and stayed there. His father needed an assistant, and he was the one person in the family who could write a label in a hurry without mistakes. He wrote the instructions for the dressings and the lists of the sick, he kept the day-book of the shop and the stock of the cellar, and in the evenings he went on with the ledger copies, the second set, a few pages a night, with the sound of the guns on the far side of the river. He was working at the page that covered the autumn of 1461 when the news came that the army outside had defeated the relief force on Marston Moor, and that York would have to treat. He died in 1644 in the siege and its last days, in the house in Petergate, having worked for his father and the sick of the lower streets almost to the last. The half-finished page was found on the desk with the pen laid across it. His brother and father died in the same summer, and his sister and mother in the year that followed. Of the second set of the White Ledger he had been making, three quarters were complete. The remainder was copied afterwards by another hand, and the join is still visible, a small change in the slope of the letters, where a careful young man stopped and a later one began. Bartholomew Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the youngest scribe of the line, the apprentice who copied the White Ledger by candlelight while a city starved around him and who tried, alone of his generation, to hold the old quarrel up to the light without picking a side. In the Slayerverse he stands for the copyist's patient courage, the belief that a record made twice survives once, and the quiet faith that a fair hand and an open mind are as much a part of a slayer family as any stake.