Dorothy Proctor

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

Dorothy Proctor was born in 1551 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and she died there sixty-five years later, in 1616, after a fall from a horse. Between those dates she was a baker, and for most of her adult life the first lit window in her street. She was the daughter of Gilbert Proctor, a fuller who worked at the cloth mills by the Wharfe, and Cecily Metcalfe, a chandler who dipped candles in a back room. Her elder brother was Lancelot Proctor, the notary's clerk who became a vampire slayer, and her younger brother was Anthony Proctor, the saddler. Dorothy belonged to the slayer family of the Proctors without ever carrying a stake, and she made that position into something more useful than a weapon: she fed the people who did. Her childhood was warm, noisy and a little singed. The Proctor house near the bridge had two trades under one roof, the fuller's wet labour at the mill and her mother's hot, greasy work with the tallow pots, and the children slept in the loft over the kitchen where both smells came up through the boards. Dorothy was the practical one. At six she was set to turning rush lights in the cooling trays; at nine she was minding the baby, Anthony; at twelve she was selling cakes at the market cross for a neighbour who had a bread oven and needed an honest girl. She liked the oven immediately. She liked the heat and the pulse of it, the way a good fire told you the hour, the way a loaf announced itself done by its sound when tapped underneath. She liked, most of all, being up at three in the morning when the town slept and she alone knew it was already tomorrow. She was nearly the right age to be frightened by the rising of the northern earls, and she was not. In the cold late autumn of 1569 the rebel companies came to the country around Wetherby, and the townspeople shut their shutters and hid their grain, and the neighbour's oven fell quiet because there was no flour. Dorothy, eighteen, was the one who pointed out that soldiers of either party would be hungry, and that a girl who baked would be safe in the one trade everyone needed. She baked through that week in the neighbour's shuttered kitchen, handing loaves out of a side window to anyone who would pay in coin and to some who would not. Later she said it was the first time she understood that bread was a kind of safe passage. That year she also learned that her elder brother kept a second book at the notary's, because he came home one evening with ink on his cuffs and an expression she had never seen, and she asked him straight out what it was. He told her, which none of the rest of the family would have done. She did not faint or exclaim. She asked whether he had eaten. In 1573 she married Henry Calverley, a clothier from Pudsey, whom she had met when he came to the Wetherby market with sample lengths and was caught out by a shower and a very small bakery doorway. He sold broadcloth and kersey, travelled between the dales and the Leeds cloth halls, and talked about wool in the voice other men used for horses. She thought him a fussy, decent, funny man who counted his coins twice, and she was right on all three points. They set up house together in Wetherby, where her ovens were, rather than in Pudsey, and Henry brought his cloth packs to the yard behind the bakehouse and stacked them like a second pantry. They had no children. It was a grief that neither of them spoke of directly, and it made the household turn outward: the apprentices, the neighbours' children, the nephew and niece from Lancelot's house who spent half their childhoods under the bakehouse table. Her bakery was more than a shop. It opened at dawn, closed for dinner and opened again at dusk, and between those hours the whole of the town's talk passed across her counter. She heard who had been out late, whose cow had gone dry, which carter had refused a night road, which widow had taken to burning candles all night. She did not ask questions; she was told. In a slayer family that kind of attention is worth more than a pistol. When Lancelot began cross-examining the alehouses he found that half of what he needed had already been mentioned over a loaf of manchet at Dorothy's counter, and she had remembered it. She never wrote any of it down. She repeated it to him on Sundays, in the kitchen, without comment, as one passes salt. Some of the White Ledger's entries in the 1580s, in her brother's clear hand, carry a small mark in the margin that the family later explained as the sign for baker's report. She was not entirely a mere informant, and she knew the work well enough to feed it. When Lancelot went out to a dusk hunt she would send a covered basket with him: hot bread, a hard cheese, a bottle of small beer, and a stub of tallow candle from her mother's stock. She would not let him go hungry on a vigil and she would not let a hunt run past the hour that she judged sensible. In the summer of 1588, when the beacons stood ready along the coast and the entire north was fearful of Spanish landings, she baked for three nights without sleeping for the men who stood watch on the hill. Henry, who had grown to know the family business as one knows a relative's odd religion, took to carrying water up to the beacon crews in his empty cloth carts. Neither of them thought of this as part of the White Ledger. Lancelot entered it anyway, under the heading of aid. Dorothy took the Guest less seriously than her brother did, and said so. She had been brought up to know that at Towton in 1461 a Lancastrian was supposed to have let something through the lines, and that the Faulkner family in Lancashire said the Proctors had done the same; the whole business sounded to her like two bakers each swearing the other had short-weighted the bread. She suspected that both ledgers were right about the thing they could see and wrong about the thing they could not. When Lancelot grew sombre about it she told him that grudges were like old dough and either got used or got thrown out. He did not take her advice, nor did the Faulkners, and the rivalry between the families of the Wars of the Roses went on in its non-violent, unresolved way as it always had. But she kept her own counsel and her own ovens, and said that if a Faulkner ever came to Wetherby he could sit at her table and be fed. As far as the family records show, none ever came. The early Stuart years were harder, and she noticed them first as flour prices. The bad harvests, the rising price of grain and the hard winters pressed her trade, and when the plague years came she kept her bakehouse open, and she kept it clean, with a lime-washed oven floor, scalded troughs and a basin of vinegar at the door. Henry was ill through the end of the first decade of the century, a long wasting weariness that took the colour out of him month by month, and she nursed him in the room above the bakehouse with the heat of the ovens coming up through the floor. He died in 1610. She went back to the ovens the next morning at three, because the town needed bread and because, as she said, it was the only thing she knew how to do that was certain to turn out. Lancelot died the winter after, and she buried him too. In the years that remained she ran the bakery with a hired lad and a steady girl, and she became something of a figure: the old Proctor woman by the bridge whose loaves were always warm and who never told a story twice. She rode, when she had to, to buy flour at the mills upriver, on a stout bay mare that she had owned for years. In 1616, on one of those flour journeys, the mare shied at something in the road, a barking dog or a flapping sack, and Dorothy came off on the stones. She was carried home and lived a short while. The family said afterwards that she had been remarkably calm, and that she had asked the neighbour to see that the morning's dough was not left to spoil. Dorothy Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the baker who kept the slayer family fed and the Ledger fed with news, and as the one who understood that a dusk hunt begins at an oven at three in the morning. Her kitchen was the first place a hunter was welcome and the last place a secret was kept. In the Slayerverse she stands for the unarmed heart of the White Ledger tradition: the hands that feed, the ears that listen, and the plain, stubborn, unrecorded kindness without which no slayer's tally would ever have been worth the keeping.