Clemence Kershaw

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

Clemence Kershaw was up before the birds every day of her working life, and the first thing she did was to go out to the byre with a lantern and a pail. She was born in 1643 at Knaresborough in Yorkshire, in the eighteenth year of the reign of a king who would lose both crown and head, and she was born into a town that stood high above the gorge of the river Nidd with its ruined castle looking down on the water. Her family, the Kershaws, kept a few cows on rented pasture on the edge of the Forest of Knaresborough, and they made their living from milk, butter and cheese carried to the town market twice a week. Her parents are not named in the White Ledger's papers, but the family remembered that her father was a silent man with big hands and her mother a sharp-tongued one with a great talent for cheese. The years of her early childhood were the years of the Civil War in Yorkshire, and Knaresborough had been a Royalist garrison whose castle Parliament's forces battered and then had pulled down, so that the town lived among broken towers and the resentment of the defeated. Clemence grew up in an age of tight purses. The land had been trampled by armies, the taxes had been high, and every cow was a serious asset. She learned to milk before she could reach the cow's back. She learned to skim the cream from the wide shallow pans in the dairy, to churn butter in a plunge churn until her arms ached, to press curds in a cheese-vat and turn the cheeses on their shelves, and to salt the butter in the autumn for the winter store. It was a life of scalded pans and cold stone floors, of clean linen and careful weights, and it made a woman who was strong, brisk, exact and impatient with waste. She was also known, in the dales round about, for a particular kind of cheese, a soft, moist, slightly acid cheese made from the evening milk, eaten fresh with a little honey or, when the harvest was in, with a slice of apple pie. She sold it at Knaresborough market from a stall in the shadow of the old market cross, and in time carried it out on the Great North Road to the coaching inns at Boroughbridge and Wetherby, where the innkeepers bought butter and cheese for the tables of travellers. The coaching roads of Yorkshire were a new source of custom in those years, since the Restoration had brought more traffic in letters, travellers and goods, and a girl who could make butter that did not turn in a warm carriage had a better trade than her mother had known. She met Roland Proctor at that stall. He was a young clerk in a Knaresborough attorney's office, a Proctor of the line that kept the White Ledger and that traced itself back through Robert Proctor to Walter Proctor, who had opened the family's tally in 1455 in the Wars of the Roses, and he was also, though Clemence did not yet know, a slayer. He was a thin, inky, earnest young man with a serious mouth, and he came to buy cheese for his master's table every Thursday and lingered to talk. She said later that she took him at first for the dullest man in the North Riding, since he could speak for an hour on the law of copyhold, and that it had taken her a month to realise that he was also the funniest. They were married in 1661, in the parish church at Knaresborough, with a wedding breakfast of her own cheeses, and moved into a narrow house near the bridge where the sound of the Nidd filled the night. It was some time before he told her the secret. It was not that he did not trust her, but that the Proctors had never quite known how to tell a wife. When he did, he told her in the dairy, over the cheese vats, with his eyes on the floor, that he had been called as a hunter of vampires and that the White Ledger, which the family had kept since 1455, was in a chest in his mother's house. Clemence heard him out and then asked practical questions, including whether the ledger needed dry storage, and whether the hours he kept on Thursdays would trouble the milking. She added, with an odd, thoughtful look, that she had seen things in the byre at night that she had put down to the cold. It was, Roland said afterwards, the most reassuring conversation of his life. She had been taught by the animals to notice when something was wrong, and she had noticed for years. She never became a slayer, and she never needed to. What she gave the Proctors was a good deal of quiet help that the ledgers do not usually record. She kept a dairy that needed people to be up at odd hours, so that a husband's absences were never questioned. She noticed things on the roads, since her work took her to inns and cattle markets where there was a great deal of gossip, and she passed on what she heard, that a drover had turned back from a village he usually stopped at, that a whole herd had gone off its milk in a hamlet near Ripon, that a landlord had begun to keep his shutters closed at noon. Roland often hunted on her word. She was, in the language of the family, the White Ledger's ears in the dairy. Their daughter Avice Proctor was born in 1664, and their son Roland Kershaw Proctor in 1667, and the boy's middle name honoured his mother's family, a Proctor way of remembering a house that would otherwise vanish. Neither child was called. Avice grew up quick and capable, working beside her mother in the dairy from the age of six, and Roland the younger, a thin, thoughtful boy with his father's inky fingers, took to books and to the law. Clemence brought them up sternly, making them wash the pails and chalk their letters on the slate floor, and she taught them that a household needed a dozen small tasks done well before anything grand could be attempted. The great plague year of 1665 had come in the middle of those years, with the frightening news from London and the rumour of pestilence in every carrier's cart, and she had scoured the dairy with vinegar and lime that summer until the flags shone, and would not let a stranger's cheese cloth cross her threshold. The rivalry with the Faulkners of Lancashire mattered to Clemence in the way that a neighbour's feud matters, a matter of tone in the household and occasional ill temper at the dinner table. Roland kept the White Ledger as a proud Yorkist, cross about the Guest who escaped at Towton in 1461 and certain that the Faulkners had let it go, and the Faulkner tallies drew from him a reliable grumble at every reading of their figures. Clemence, who had heard the whole speech a hundred times, took a certain pleasure in interrupting it to ask whether he had eaten. She said the Faulkners were probably just like the Proctors, hardworking people who wished to be right. The winters of Yorkshire were hard on her. A dairywoman works in cold and wet, kneeling on stone in a draught, and in the winter of 1682 she caught a cough that would not leave. It settled in the chest, and through January and February it grew worse, with fever at night and a rattle in the morning. Roland sat with her and Avice ran the dairy in her place, and the cheese was still made and sold at the market cross, in a smaller quantity, under the girl's hand. Clemence died that winter in 1682, aged thirty-nine, and was buried at Knaresborough. Roland outlived her by twenty-five years and never married again, and her children carried on both dairy and ledger for a generation. In the Slayerverse she is remembered by the Proctors as the woman whose cheese and whose quick ears kept the White Ledger fed.