Christiana Proctor

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

In the family papers Christiana Proctor is described in three words, "the tavern keeper's daughter", and the phrase was affectionate rather than dismissive. She was born in 1592 at Richmond in Yorkshire, in a tall, narrow house off the cobbled market place where her father, Lawrence Proctor, conducted his trade as a wool factor and leased the taproom on the ground floor to a succession of tenants he never quite trusted. It meant that she grew up in a house whose front door opened directly onto the noise of a public room, and whose back stairs led to a table piled with letters, weights and bills of lading. She learned, as a result, how to listen to two kinds of talk at once, and the skill served the White Ledger for the rest of her life. Richmond in her childhood was a market town of steep streets, with a great Norman castle looming over the river Swale and a church-bell for every hour. The wool trade of the dales passed through it: fleeces from the high pastures of Swaledale and Wensleydale, knitted stockings sold by the dozen, coarse cloth sent south to be finished. Lawrence bought from the farms and sold to the merchants of York and Halifax, and lived on the margin between them. He was also a recusant, one of the Yorkshire families who kept to the old faith and paid the fines for it, and the household was accustomed to a certain wariness: a priest slept in the loft at intervals, a shutter was closed early, a name was not repeated in the taproom. What Lawrence guarded most carefully, though, was not a vestment or a missal but a chest of papers, the Proctor family's account of itself, which he kept through the hard times of the Elizabethan fines and the early Stuart suspicions. Christiana's mother, Sibyl Birtwistle, was a dairywoman, and it was Sibyl who did the household's real work. She kept cows on the common pasture, made butter and cheese for the market, and ruled the kitchen with an authority that the lodgers and drovers respected. Christiana was one of four children: her elder sister Katherine, born in 1585, and her brother Richard, born in 1588, both of whom became slayers, and her younger brother Abraham, born in 1594, who did not. She was the third of them, the one who stayed quiet at the edge of the hearth while the older two were taught to fight, and it would be easy to assume from the records that she was overlooked. She was not. She was the family's clerk, though nobody called her that, and by the age of twelve she could copy a page of Lawrence's ledger so faithfully that visitors could not tell hers from his. Her contribution to the hunting side of the family was of the quiet kind, and the White Ledger entries in her hand are the best evidence for it. Katherine and Richard came home from a hunt with their reports half-remembered, tired and bruised, and it was Christiana who sat down with them and asked the questions that turned a night's confusion into a proper entry: the hour, the place, the number, the witnesses. She was patient, exact, and unafraid of an awkward silence, and she had a memory for names that made her useful in a tavern where every third customer had a story about a haunted barn or a missing sheep. A good many of the hunts that her siblings undertook in the 1600s and 1610s began with something Christiana had overheard in the taproom. She learned to tell a drover's tall tale from a truthful one, and she would write the true ones on a slip of paper and leave it under Richard's plate. Her appearance and manner are recalled in one sentence from a cousin's letter: a small, straight woman, with grey eyes and a way of putting her head to one side when she was deciding whether to believe you. She had no great patience for show, dressed in plain wool, and disliked the noise of the public room even though she had been raised above it. She also had a stubborn streak that her mother recognised in herself and enjoyed. When a suitor of the town, well-off and confident, came courting at the age of twenty, she declined him on the ground that he had never once asked her a question. The man she did marry was Alastair Thorne, a yeoman of the House of Thorne, the border-reiver line of the Northumbrian marches that had since become mountain hunters and small farmers. They wed in 1615, when she was twenty-three. Alastair was not a slayer, but he came from a house that understood the trade, and that mattered more to Christiana than any settlement of land. He farmed a few fields and ran cattle, and he spoke slowly and dryly, in an accent that Richmond's tavern-goers found comic and Christiana found restful. The marriage joined a Proctor daughter to a Thorne farmer, one of the ties by which the two hunting houses of the north held each other in view, and it allowed her to carry the White Ledger's habits into a household of hard-handed people who did not usually write anything down. They had two daughters, Christiana Thorne, born in 1616, and Sibyl Proctor, born in 1617, named for Christiana's mother in the Proctor style of passing the surname through the women. The younger Christiana became a slayer; the elder Christiana had by then given up any thought of hunting herself, and turned her energies to teaching her children how to observe, how to record, and how to weigh what people told them. The girls grew up with a mother who kept a small book of her own in the kitchen, written in the same steady hand as the ledger, and with a father who preferred to say nothing, so that they learned early both the value of speech and the value of silence. Christiana Thorne, who lived until 1693, took the ledger habits with her into the field, and Sibyl, who lived until 1685, kept the family's letters in order. The rivalry with the Faulkners reached her chiefly as gossip. In a tavern town on the north road it was impossible to avoid the tales of the Red Ledger, the boasts of Lancastrian carriers, the argument about who had let the Guest escape at Towton, which by her lifetime was already a hundred and thirty years old and no nearer to a verdict. Christiana kept to the Proctor side of it without heat. She collected the Faulkners' reputations as she collected everything else, on slips of paper, and she seems to have believed that the only honest way to answer a claim was to record it exactly and let the tally speak. Her father's death in 1621 and her mother's in 1623 fell in the years when she was raising two small girls, and she took up the chest of family papers with a mixture of grief and relief, since somebody had to. She lived through the plague years and the hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, when Richmond's steep streets were shut against travellers and the taproom stood empty for weeks, and she died in 1641 of old age, at forty-nine, in a period when that phrase was applied generously to women who had simply used themselves up. She did not live to see the civil wars arrive on the Swale. Alastair outlived her by twelve years, dying in 1653. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the tavern keeper's daughter who kept the White Ledger honest.