The cows of the dairy beyond Bootham Bar knew Clemence Proctor's step and her voice, and it was said among the other maids that she could quiet a nervous heifer by humming a psalm tune under her breath and leaning her forehead against the animal's flank. She was born in York, Yorkshire, in 1466, the youngest child of Walter Proctor, the clerk who kept the White Ledger's accounts, and of Clemence Thwaites, the laundress from Ripon whose name she carried. Her sister was Isabel Proctor, born in 1462, and her brother Jeremy Proctor, born in 1465. She was, in the family's shorthand, the last of the three, and she was the only one who would spend her whole short life within a few miles of the house where she was born.
York in her childhood was still one of the great cities of England, walled and gated, its towers and bars looking out over the Vale, its river the Ouse crowded with boats bringing wine, wool, timber and fish. The minster rose over the close, half hidden in the smoke of a thousand chimneys, and inside the walls the streets ran close and narrow: the Shambles with its butchers, Stonegate with its stationers and glass-painters, Coppergate where the cordwainers worked, and the guildhalls where the merchants and craftsmen met to regulate their trades. The city took great pride in its officers and processions, and in the Corpus Christi plays acted on wagons through the streets each summer. The family lived near the close, in a timber-framed house with a yard where her mother hung the washing. Clemence was a child who liked the yard more than the street. She liked hens, kittens, the smell of hay carried in on carts, and the slow, soft business of animals.
She was not a scholar. Her father taught Isabel Latin numerals and the formulae of oath and bond, and Jeremy learned his letters grudgingly and then ran off to the fells, but Clemence took only what she needed, enough reading to follow a prayer book and enough figures to reckon a milk-tally. She was tall like her mother, with a long jaw and grey eyes, strong shoulders, and hands that were never quite free of the smell of cream. Neighbours remembered her as unhurried, private, a little vague, given to long silences, and to standing at the door in the evening with a lantern watching the sky change. She had a soft laugh and a sudden one, and she was nobody's fool. It was noticed that she never once repeated a piece of gossip.
The Wars of the Roses were the background of her early childhood, though not in any way she could have described. In 1485, when Richard III died at Bosworth, she was nineteen and old enough to feel it. York had loved Richard. The city council wrote in its records that the king had been piteously slain and murdered, and the streets went quiet for weeks. Her father, a Yorkist clerk in his bones, said nothing at all at supper for several days. Then in January 1486 her sister Isabel married Thomas Faulkner of Lancashire in the minster, a ceremony that the whole household understood as a truce dressed as a wedding. Clemence stood in the nave with a linen veil and wondered, she told her brother later, how anyone could be married in a room where so many people looked at each other in that way. Her father died that year, and it was her first close experience of grief.
By then she was working. The dairy was a large one, belonging to an institution of the city, with a pasture that ran down toward the river, and she took her place in it at fourteen, rising at four to milk, skim and churn. A dairymaid's day began in the dark, with pails, stools and cold hands, and went on through cheese-making, the turning of curds, the salting and pressing, until the light was gone. She was happier in that regularity than she had ever been in her father's household. The butter she sent to market was firm and pale gold. The cheese, made from ewe's milk in spring and cow's in summer, sold well in the Thursday market. She became the senior maid in a few years, and the farm's steward wrote her name in the account rolls with a small tick of approval.
She did not marry, though offers came. A young man from a village near Tadcaster asked for her in her early twenties, and a widowed cooper later, and she declined both with a quiet firmness that surprised her family. She said only that she liked her work and her place and had no wish to exchange either. The women of the dairy took this as the natural way of things, and her mother, who had been twenty-nine before she married, did not press her. She remained in the family house as long as her mother was alive, and afterwards took a room near the farm.
Her connection to the family's other business was slight but real. She knew what her father and sister did, since she had grown up around it, and she was trusted to hold what she knew. Isabel, who lived away from York after her marriage, wrote to her often, and Clemence was sometimes the one who received messages for the White Ledger's keepers, holding them safely until a rider came. When slayers visited York they would stop at the dairy for milk and bread, and it was said that no hunter left the yard without her seeing whether his boots were wet, his hands cut or his face grey. A cousin who visited York in the 1490s recalled that she noticed a vampire's absence of breath on a cold morning before the hunter beside her did, and simply said, in her soft voice, that the man at the gate was not warm. That was all. It was not her craft, and she never made it so.
She did not live long. In the year 1500 York was struck, as many places were, by a season of sickness, and Clemence took a fever in the summer that ran through her in days. She died at thirty-four, in the little room by the dairy, with the sound of the cows coming in the yard. Her mother, Clemence Thwaites, died in the same year, and the family found itself burying two women who shared a name. Jeremy came down from the fells and Isabel from the Faulkner household, and they stood together in the churchyard with the dairy maids, who brought a cheese.
She left no children and no ledger entry. What she left was a name in the household memory as the youngest, the quiet one, the one who kept to the cows. In the modern Slayerverse, where every Proctor is asked about the weapons and the tallies, the Proctors who tell her story use it as the counterweight: the cost of every hunt is paid in part by someone who chose the dairy, who stayed within the sound of the bells, and who kept her lantern in the window.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
