Cecily Metcalfe

Spouse of Gilbert Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

A chandler's shop is a good place to learn who is afraid of the dark. Cecily Metcalfe learned it at Richmond in the North Riding, where she was born in 1526 beneath the grey keep on its crag, and she carried the lesson with her for the rest of a long life. She became a chandler, a maker and seller of candles, soap and rushlights, she married into the Proctor household at Wetherby in 1547, and she died in 1593 in the course of a hard winter, in her late sixties, having outlived her husband by three years. She was never called as a vampire slayer and never wished to be, but she spent forty-three years inside a slayer family and shaped it more than most of its hunters did. Her parents are not named in the family's ledgers, and she herself spoke of them rarely, except to say that the shop in Richmond was dark, cold and honest. The Metcalfes were a small trading family with a tallow-room behind the street, and the girl was set to work almost as soon as she could hold a wick. She learned to render fat, to skim and strain it, to dip rushes, to pour wax candles for the church trade and the cheap tallow dips that the poor burned by the dozen. It was dirty, smelly, laborious work, and she was good at it. By eighteen she was managing the dipping-room herself, and her candles had a name in the market for burning clean and steady, with no spit and little smoke. A chandler also kept the town's ledgers of quantity and price, so she grew up counting, weighing and measuring, which a clerk's family would later find very congenial. Richmond was also the town of Agnes Barlow, the spinner who had become the vampire slayer called The Wary Bell, and Cecily's mother remembered her. The old woman used to say that the sharp-faced spinner had once bought a pound of the best wax and refused to say why, and that a week later the Brompton ditch had been quiet. This was how Cecily first heard of the slayer family she would marry into; she heard it as a piece of kitchen gossip and thought no more about it. When she travelled to Wetherby in the spring of 1547 to buy tallow from a mill-house and met a fuller called Gilbert Proctor, she had no notion that his grandmother was the same woman. She learned it afterwards, and she was, in her own words, not even surprised. Gilbert had come to the chandler's stall to buy candles for the fulling mill, where the stocks ran day and night in winter. He was a broad, quiet man with yellowed hands, and he stood arguing about the price of tallow with an energy that surprised them both. She thought him comic and he thought her the sharpest person he had ever met. They were married that same year, 1547, in the church at Wetherby, and Cecily moved across the moor with a vat, a set of moulds, a chest of linen and a few hard opinions. She set up a chandlery in the front room of the Proctor house, where the smell of fat mingled with the smell of wet wool from the mill, and within a year she was supplying candles to three parishes and had hired a girl from the town to help at the dipping. Her first child, Lancelot Proctor, was born in 1548, a thin, grave boy who watched everything. Her daughter Dorothy Proctor followed in 1551, a quick, shrewd child who could tell a short-weight candle by feel at the age of six. Her youngest, Anthony Proctor, came in 1555, a steady, gentle baby who grew into the steadiest hands in the family. She raised them in a household that ran on trades and rituals, and she took charge of the second sort as firmly as the first. When she was told, soon after the wedding, that the Proctors kept a book called the White Ledger and that the book had a secret, she listened and asked three questions: where it was kept, who might see it, and whether the chest was dry. Satisfied by the answers, she added a layer of oiled cloth of her own devising and a bag of lime to draw damp from the corners. For nearly fifty years the ledger was never once spoiled by weather, and it was a chandler's wife who saw to it. Light was her particular contribution to the family's work. The slayers of the Proctor line did their work in the dark, on marsh paths and in churchyards at night, and they needed lanterns that would not gutter in a wind, candles that would burn a whole watch, tapers that could be shielded behind a hand and relit. Cecily's brother-in-law Humphrey, who became a slayer in 1556, came to her with his requirements, and between them they devised a close-wicked, slow-burning lantern candle of beeswax and tallow, hard enough to stand a ride in a coat pocket and bright enough to read by. It was sold in the shop as an ordinary traveller's taper, and the Proctor hunters used it for years. She also supplied wax for the seals on the ledger and the sealed reports sent between the branches of the family, an unglamorous task on which a great deal depended. The years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from about 1549 to 1560, made her trade strange. Church candles were first forbidden, then required, then forbidden again, and the demand for them shifted from month to month. Cecily met each change with calm arithmetic, stocking some wax and hiding more, and she reasoned that the parish would want its lights back sooner or later. She was right. She also found, in the quiet of those years, that her skill at reading the faces of customers was useful in another way. A woman who bought nine candles to burn through a single night was a woman who was afraid of something, and Cecily would ask her kindly what it was. A surprising number of the answers, passed on to Humphrey in the evenings, turned into entries in the White Ledger. She was in her early forties when the rising of the northern earls shook Yorkshire in 1569 and 1570. She did not like the rising and liked its aftermath even less. Reprisals followed, and Wetherby was watched, and one night in the winter she packed the sealed ledger in a hollowed block of tallow and carried it herself to Richmond, in a cart under sacks of rushlights, to be kept in her sister-in-law's cousin's cellar until the searching was over. The journey took two days and the cart was stopped once. A man with a lantern lifted the sacks, smelled the fat, wrinkled his nose and waved her on. It was, she said afterwards, the only time in her life she was glad of the stink of her own trade. Her marriage was long and good. She and Gilbert were never effusive, but they sat together through the evenings, he copying entries by her candlelight, she reckoning accounts at his elbow, and they spoke to each other in a shorthand of looks. She mothered Bridget, his sister, when the spinner moved in, and she mourned Humphrey in 1572 with a plain grief that she hid by working through the night. When Bridget died in 1584 and Gilbert in 1590 the house grew quiet, and Cecily kept the shop open, though the dipping was done by her daughter and the girl. She was by then the keeper of the household's memory, and children came to hear her talk of Richmond and the spinner who had bought the wax. The winter of 1592 into 1593 was a hard one, long and bitter, with frozen ponds, failed carts and a scarcity of fuel. Cecily spent it in the front room beside the last of her moulds, and as the cold deepened she weakened, and she died quietly in the new year at the age of sixty-seven. A light was left burning in the window the night she died; it was her own candle, and she had made it herself. Cecily Metcalfe is remembered in the Proctor family as the chandler who kept the White Ledger dry and the hunters' lanterns lit, the woman who married a fuller and made a slayer family's nights bearable. In the Slayerverse she stands for the in-laws who joined the Proctors from outside the Wars of the Roses story and the quarrel of Towton and the Guest, and who, by their trade and temper, gave a family of ledger-keepers its steady flame.