Bridget Proctor

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

The wheel in the Proctor kitchen at Wetherby had been Agnes Barlow's, and Bridget Proctor spun on it for fifty years until the spokes were polished to the colour of horn. She was born in 1525 in that town, in Yorkshire, between two brothers, and she never married. She spun yarn for a living, and in the course of spinning she listened, remembered and counted, which in a slayer family turns out to be a profession of its own. She died in 1584, at fifty-nine, of the sweating sickness, six years before her elder brother Gilbert Proctor was taken by the same fever. Her father was Ambrose Proctor, a tanner, who worked in the pits behind the house and came in smelling of oak bark. Her mother was Maud Hebblethwaite, a brewster, whose ale-house ran off the same kitchen and filled it with talk on market days. Bridget grew up in a room that was never empty: carters, drovers, shepherds, glovers and the occasional anonymous traveller, all leaning on the settle and speaking in the loose, unguarded way people speak over a cup. She learned very early to sit in a corner with a spindle in her hand, apparently absorbed in the thread, and to hear every word. Her mother noticed, and approved. A girl who could turn a bobbin and a rumour at the same time would never lack for work. The household was a modest one, but it carried a great weight. Ambrose was the son of Jeremy Proctor, the fell shepherd, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner of Richmond who had been the vampire slayer called The Wary Bell. The grandmother had died two years before Bridget's older brother was born, and her wheel, her bobbins, a bundle of tally-sticks and a small sealed ledger came down to the family along with the stories. Bridget was given the wheel. It was not an official bequest, only the sort of arrangement in which a child sits down at something and nobody has the heart to move her. She learned to spin on the very machine on which her grandmother had once spun and eavesdropped, and she grew up in the belief that the work and the watching belonged together. She had two brothers. Gilbert Proctor, born in 1522, became a fuller and grew into a steady, wry, slow-moving man who copied the White Ledger in a clean hand. Humphrey Proctor, born in 1529, became a manor-court clerk and, in 1556, a vampire slayer. Bridget stood between them like the middle strand in a plait. She teased Gilbert for his slowness and worried about Humphrey's thinness, and she was the only one who could make either of them laugh in the middle of an argument. As the three grew up the pattern settled: Gilbert kept the books, Humphrey went out at night, and Bridget knew what everyone was saying. For a spinner of the sixteenth century, the work was long and unglamorous. Wool arrived in sacks from the fells, was carded, combed, oiled and drawn into thread, and the thread was sold by the hank to weavers in the town and the villages around. A good spinner could produce a few pounds of yarn a week, and a very good one, as Bridget became, could spin a thread so fine and even that weavers asked for her by name. She worked at the great wheel in the winter, by the fire, and on the distaff in summer, outside the door where the light was better, and she talked while she worked. Women brought their wool to her and stayed to gossip. Over a decade Bridget accumulated a vast, unwritten register: who was courting whom, whose husband was away at odd hours, which farm had lost a lamb in a way that did not look like a fox, which child had begun to sleep in the day and wake at night. She never wrote a word of it down. She did not need to. When Humphrey wanted to know whether something unnatural was moving in a particular parish, he first went and sat by his sister's wheel. The family used to say that her skill was the same as Agnes's, handed on through the spindle. Agnes had been a detective who happened to spin; Bridget was a spinner who happened to detect, and the order of the two made a difference. She was not a woman who would have gone to an abandoned barn at midnight with a stake and a lantern. She was a woman who could tell, from the way a neighbour avoided a lane, that the lane deserved watching, and who would then pass the matter to her brother in a single, quiet sentence over supper. In the Slayerverse such women are the first line of any hunt, though no ledger ever records them. She never married, and the reason was less dramatic than the neighbours supposed. She was proposed to once, by a weaver, a good man, and she liked him well enough, but she liked her wheel better. She thought that a woman who married gave up her thread for his, and she was not minded to do it. Her mother let her choose. After Maud died in 1565, Bridget moved into Gilbert's house, where his wife Cecily Metcalfe, the chandler, made a place for her without fuss, and the two women ran the household's trades side by side. She spun in the front room while Cecily dipped candles at the back, and the house smelled of wax, lanolin and woodsmoke. She taught her nieces and nephew to spin, to count, and to keep their mouths shut, and for the children she was the best of aunts, a woman who told stories with dreadful accuracy and no moral. The years from about 1549 to 1560, the religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, were her young womanhood. She saw saints' images carried out of the church and burned, and brought back, and carried out again, and she had her own opinion about each change, which she shared only with her wheel. What she noticed above all was how fear moved through the women's talk. A woman who told her that the priest would not say a certain prayer was telling her something about the churchyard, and she passed it on. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 was another, sharper lesson. When armed men passed through Wetherby there was a sudden new traffic in rumour, and Bridget sorted it as she sorted wool, separating the long staple of fact from the short stuff of panic. She told her family which stories to ignore, and she was right more often than any official. Humphrey's death in 1572 hit her harder than anyone had expected. She did not weep in front of the household. She spun for three days without stopping, until Cecily took the distaff out of her hands and put her to bed, and afterwards she became quieter and even more watchful. From then on she kept a small private habit: each evening she would draw out a thread and tie a knot in it for every name she wished to remember, and when the thread was full she would burn it. No one ever asked what the knots meant. The sweating sickness came to Wetherby in the summer of 1584. It struck fast, with a cold shudder, a pouring sweat and a stupor, and Bridget was among the first in the lane to fall ill. She was nursed by Cecily and by her niece, and she died within a day. At the end she asked for her grandmother's wheel to be set where she could see it, and she watched the spokes until she could no longer focus. Gilbert, who survived her by six years, kept the wheel and the sealed ledger together in the chest in the loft. Bridget Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the spinner who heard everything and wrote nothing, the one who kept Agnes Barlow's wheel turning for fifty years. In the Slayerverse she stands for the listeners of a slayer family, the quiet women at the wheel whose spoken warnings fed the White Ledger long after the quarrel of Towton and the Wars of the Roses had settled into rumour, and whose thread, like her grandmother's, was never broken by anything but death.