Blaise Proctor

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

The abbey church at Selby was the largest building Blaise Proctor ever saw as a boy, and it was already half a ruin. He was born there in 1558, in a low brick-and-timber cottage on the road down to the Ouse, in the first months of Elizabeth's reign, when the great Benedictine house had been dissolved for twenty years and the town still hadn't decided what to do with its bones. The nave had become the parish church. The monastic barns were sold off, the fishponds silted, and the stone was slowly walking away into other people's walls. Blaise was the third son of Kit Dewhurst, a fuller, and Joan Proctor, the woman the White Ledger would call a York notary's wife who took the mantle after her husband died. His brothers were Lawrence Proctor, born in 1554, Godfrey Proctor, born in 1557, and the baby of the family, Kit Proctor, born in 1560. His father died in 1561, when Blaise was three, and he remembered nothing of him but the smell of wet wool. Joan kept the children together on what the family had and what she earned by her wits, and they moved between York and Selby as work required. Blaise seems to have been the boy who liked the country. He was not clever with letters the way Lawrence was, or restless with iron like Godfrey, but he had an eye for weather, for the look of a beast that was going to sicken, and for the price a load of barley would fetch on Thursday. Selby was a river port and market town, with corn and salt and hides moving through it by barge, and a ferry across the Ouse that ran until the light failed. A boy could learn a great deal there just by sitting on a wall. When Joan died in 1573 he was fifteen. The brothers were sent to what relatives and masters could be found, and Blaise took service as a farm hand with a yeoman on the flat clay country south of Selby, ploughing wheat and beans and mending the drainage ditches that kept the Humberhead levels from turning back into marsh. He learned the yeoman's life: a man who owned or held enough land to feed his household with a little to spare, who sat on the jury and stood in the church in a good coat, and who could look a gentleman in the eye without the gentleman noticing that he was being looked at. By his early twenties Blaise had saved enough for a lease on forty acres and a share in a plough team, and he had begun to think about a wife. In 1579 he married Fenella Thorne, a housekeeper in the household of a Selby maltster. She was five years his elder, born in 1554, and she brought to the marriage no dowry but a chest of good linen, a knife she was reluctant to explain, and a family name that meant something in the north. The Thornes were border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, hard riders who had lived by cattle and feud on the Tyne and the Coquet, and one branch of them had drifted south after a bad winter and a worse quarrel. Fenella did not talk about it. But she ran the maltster's house with the calm of a woman who had once run a peel tower under threat, and Blaise, who had grown up among women of the same kind, understood at once what he was looking at. They were wed in the parish church, in the shadow of the old abbey walls, with Godfrey serving as witness. Their household was a working one. The farmhouse had a hall, a kitchen and a loft, and the yard held two cows, a dozen sheep, a sow and more hens than anyone had counted. Fenella ran the dairy and the accounts, brewed the small beer, and taught the children that a door was to be barred at dusk and a candle kept burning in the shutters until the household was in. Blaise took this, as he took most things, as a fact of country life; he learned only slowly what it meant. Their first child, Oswald Proctor, was born in 1580, and their second, Dionisia Proctor, in 1581, so close together that neighbours called them the twins for years, though they were not. Both were raised to read a little, count a great deal and keep quiet about what they saw from the loft window. The Proctors of Selby were not slayers, and Blaise never claimed to be. His brother Godfrey held the family mantle in York; their mother had held it before him. But the yeoman's farm, standing alone on the clay a couple of miles from the town, was a useful thing to a hunter. It was a place to rest a horse, a place to store hawthorn and salt, and a place where a wounded man could be hidden under the hay for a week. Blaise did all of this without complaint and without asking the questions Godfrey would not have answered. When Godfrey came to the door in the small hours, in the summer of 1588, smelling of smoke and the coast road, he was handed a bowl of pease pottage and a dry shirt and left alone. The Armada summer, with beacons lit along the coast, meant to Blaise a season of nervous county musters and a demand for horses, and he sent his best mare to York for the levy and was slow to be paid. The Selby years were mostly good ones, but they were not easy. Fenella died in 1595, aged forty-one, and the house went quiet in a way that no amount of work could fill. Blaise never married again. He raised the two children, then fifteen and fourteen, with the help of a widow from the next farm, and he did it with a kind of dogged tenderness that surprised even his brothers. Oswald was put to the plough, Dionisia to the dairy, and both were told in plain words what their mother had been, and what the Thorne knife was for, and where it was kept. It was as near as Blaise came to handing on the ledger. The rivalry with the Faulkners was, for him, a story told at Christmas. He knew that in 1455 two founders had opened two ledgers, that at Towton the Guest had got away, and that each house said the other was to blame. But the Faulkners were Lancashire people and Lancashire was another country, across the Pennines, with its own dialect and its own weather. He once met a Lancashire drover at Selby fair who claimed kinship with a famous Red Ledger family, and the two men spent an amiable evening comparing sheep and refusing to comment on the Guest. That was as far as Blaise's part in the feud went. The last years of his life fell in the early Stuart reign, with the new king riding south in 1603 and the plague following him through the northern towns that spring. Blaise came through it, and through the hard winters that followed, but his chest weakened. In the cold of early 1607 he took a cough that would not leave, and he died of it that winter, aged forty-nine, in the farmhouse where he had raised his children. He was buried in Selby, near the abbey he had grown up beside. Oswald took the lease; Dionisia married and moved away. The Slayerverse counts him among the Proctors who kept the doors, the beds and the barns that let the hunters do their work, and the White Ledger remembers him in a single line, written in Godfrey's hand: a good brother, and a good yeoman.