Cuthbert Proctor

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

Cuthbert Proctor was born in 1622 in Halifax, Yorkshire, in a house that smelled of oak shavings and hot iron. His father, Abraham Proctor, was a cooper, and the yard behind the dwelling was always stacked with staves seasoning in the wind off the Pennines. His mother, Dionisia Clegg, was a weaver, and in the upper room the beat of her loom went on through most of the daylight hours, so that the boy learned to tell the time of day by the rhythm of the shuttle before he learned it from any clock. It was a household in which two trades met, the hard and the soft, and Cuthbert grew up between them, too slight for the adze and too restless for the loom. In 1624 a sister was born, Florence Proctor, and the two children shared a bed under the eaves until they were old enough to be embarrassed by it. Halifax in those years was a cloth town, and a rough one. The Piece Hall had not yet been dreamed of, but the weekly cloth market was already famous, and the hillsides were dotted with the tenter frames on which the wet kersey was stretched to dry. Money in such a place was written down before it was spent. Clothiers gave credit by the piece, wool-dealers by the pack, and the smallest transaction had its scrap of paper, so that a boy who could form a neat secretary hand and cast a column of pounds, shillings and pence was worth more than one who could lift a hogshead. Abraham Proctor understood this, and he paid a few pence a week to a schoolmaster near the parish church so that his son might learn his letters, his Latin grammar in a scant portion, and above all a clear and quick script. The family were Proctors of the old White Ledger stock, and Abraham knew the names of the vampires his fathers had tallied, though he had never taken one himself. The habit of writing things down, he told his son, was the real inheritance. Cuthbert took the advice more thoroughly than anyone expected. By his early twenties he was a clerk, first in the office of a Halifax attorney and later in the service of a succession of clothiers, wool-staplers and, for some years, a magistrate whose house stood on one of the coaching roads that led toward Leeds and Wakefield. He was not a man of the road himself, but the road came to him. Every carrier and drover who passed through the market towns of the West Riding left something behind in the way of news, and a clerk who copied letters and drew up bonds heard more of the county than the preacher did. He was small, sallow, and dry of manner, with ink permanently in the creases of his right hand and a habit of pressing his lips together before he answered a question, as though checking the figure. Neighbours thought him cold. Those who worked with him thought him fair, which was rarer. He came to adulthood at the worst possible moment for a Yorkshire man of business. The civil wars split the northern gentry down every seam, and Halifax, a Parliament town in its instincts, was surrounded by gentlemen who were not. Sieges and skirmishes came and went across the Calder valley in the 1640s, and the clothiers, who wanted nothing but peace and an open road to their markets, paid taxes to whichever army was nearest. Cuthbert's masters changed their politics more than once, and he learned to write for each of them in the tone that kept the ink flowing. He did not fight. Abraham Proctor, in the last years of his life, urged him to stay out of it, and Abraham died in 1653 with his son still safely behind a desk. Dionisia Clegg had gone earlier, in 1643, in the middle of the fighting, and the family recalled that the loom was silent for a full month afterwards and that nobody could bear to touch it. The White Ledger reached Cuthbert not through a calling, for he never received one, but through his hands. In the middle years of the century the Proctor kin were scattered across Yorkshire, and the keeping of the ledger passed from house to house as slayers fell and others rose. The older hunters had trouble with the record. Their entries were in the wrong order, missing dates, or set down in a shorthand only their writers could read. Cuthbert, who was already a known clerk of good character and no relation to any faction of the county, was asked more than once to fair-copy pages of the Yorkist tally, to check the count against the parish registers and the assize rolls, and to make sure that the names, the places and the years agreed. He did this work without pay and without comment. He was never a vampire slayer, carried no blade, and had no craft to name, but a kinsman who worked the moors above Halifax remarked that the tally had never been so clean as when Cuthbert held the pen. What he found in the copying troubled him and pleased him in equal measure. He noticed, for example, that the entry concerning the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461 and whom both families blamed on the other, had been recopied so many times in two centuries that its wording had drifted. One generation had written that the fault lay with a Lancastrian archer; another that it lay with a Yorkist captain who had left his post. Cuthbert set the versions side by side and added a short note, in a scrupulous hand, saying only that the evidence supported neither. He knew the Faulkner ledger existed on the other side of the Pennines, and once or twice in the course of his work he exchanged a civil letter with a Lancashire clerk about a disputed date, in the manner of two rivals who respect each other's arithmetic. It was as near to a hunt as he ever came, and he seemed content with it. He never married. There were rumours, as there are in every market town, of a widow in Bradford and a schoolmaster's daughter in Elland, but nothing came of either, and the family later remembered that he seemed to find his companionship in his ledgers and his sister. Florence Proctor, who had become a weaver like their mother, kept a house not far from his lodging and cooked for him on Sundays. They quarrelled over small things and never over large ones. When Cuthbert was in his forties and fifty he was known in Halifax as the man who would find your lost deed, and there were few families of substance who had not at some time sat in his office while he ran a finger down a column. The great plague year of 1665 passed him by, though he watched it take other towns and wrote a steady stream of letters concerning quarantine, the carriage of goods and the disposal of the dead. The sickness reached Yorkshire in fits, and in 1686, long after the country believed the danger over, a local outbreak came up the coaching road from the south. Cuthbert caught it at sixty-four and died in 1686 in the room where he had worked for thirty years. The family kept his papers, though not all of them survived the burning that the plague made necessary, and the White Ledger fair copies he had made were among those carried out of the house before the fire. The Proctors remembered him with a certain awkward affection. He had no children and left no house, but his tidy copies became the basis of the count that later keepers used, and a Proctor of the next age wrote that the White Ledger was accurate because Cuthbert had made it so. It is a small memorial for a small man. Yet the clerks who followed him, in Yorkshire and later in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, carried his habit with them: check every figure, note every doubt, and never write what cannot be proved. In the long history of the Slayerverse, where reputation is settled by tallies, that habit counted for a great deal, and Cuthbert Proctor of Halifax deserves a place among the family's quiet builders, the ones who kept the score honest.