Eleanor Proctor

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

Eleanor Proctor was born in 1561 at Wetherby, in Yorkshire, and she died there in 1629 of a winter cough, a midwife who never married and who, in sixty-eight years, brought most of the children of three parishes into the light. She was the only child of Ninian Proctor, a horse-breaker who was also the vampire slayer called The Steady Shuttle, and Marion Hodgson, a net-maker from Whitby. She belonged to the Proctor slayer family and carried the White Ledger tradition in the one form her life allowed: she kept the record of who was born and who was not, and noticed, in the course of a long career at bedsides, everything the dark would have preferred her not to. She grew up in the yard behind the Wetherby market place, in a house that smelled of horse sweat, tar and trodden straw, with her mother's net-making frame by the window and her father's round pen of hurdles at the back. Her father doted on her with a stern absent-minded tenderness that the neighbours found comic: he could quiet a yearling stallion with a hum and could not persuade a three-year-old girl to put on her shoes. Her mother, Marion, was quick-tongued and sharp-eyed, and taught her to knot a net with a wooden needle and to read the books of a dealing yard. Eleanor was a watchful child, tall, thin and sallow, who followed her father about with a pail and learned, as a horse-breaker's daughter does, that patience and a low voice can calm nearly any frightened creature. It was a lesson she afterwards applied to frightened women. The change in her life came when she was about eleven. A neighbour's wife was in labour in the next lane, the midwife was at another house across the river, and a message came to the Proctor yard to ask if Marion could lend a clean linen sheet and hot water. Eleanor carried them over and was told to stay out of the way. She did not. She stood at the foot of the bed, holding a basin, and watched a child born; she was not frightened, only entranced. The midwife who finally arrived, an old, dry, formidable woman, found the girl holding the baby's head steady in the basin while the neighbour's mother tied the cord, and told her, not unkindly, to come and see her on Monday. She went. Within five years she was an apprentice in the trade, and the old woman had begun to say, with an air of resentful surprise, that she had never seen anyone better with her hands. The work suited her. A midwife in a Yorkshire market town in the later sixteenth century did far more than catch babies. She was licensed by the bishop, swore an oath to the church, baptised in emergencies, gave evidence in the courts when a child's parentage was disputed, laid out the dead and advised on every matter of women's health that the doctors, who were few and male, would not touch. She went at any hour, in any weather, on foot or on a borrowed horse, to farmhouses on the moor and cottages by the river. Eleanor had her father's way with a horse and could ride anywhere in the dark. She carried a small leather bag with a knife, a ball of linen thread, a vial of oil, a bundle of herbs and a folded shift, and in the bottom, wrapped in a scrap of her mother's netting, a hawthorn stake the length of a hand. She had been given it by her father on the night before he rode out for the last time, and she had never asked him why. He was killed in 1587, on the lonely road between Wetherby and Knaresborough, by something that had learned his habits and waited at a ford. She was twenty-six. Her mother brought him home on a hurdle, the old grey dog walking beside, and Eleanor washed him and laid him out with her own hands, because she was a midwife and it was what a midwife did for the beginning and the end of a life. She sat by him all that night. In the morning she asked her mother to show her the White Ledger, and Marion, who was not a slayer but understood what a ledger was for, took it from the chest and let her read her father's last entry. That was the moment she decided what her work would be. She was not called to the stake, and she did not pretend to be. She would be the eye at the door. It was, in fact, a very good place to be. A midwife sees a household from the inside at the moment of greatest weakness. She knows when a woman is pale beyond what the labour explains, when a husband has marks on his neck he does not want seen, when a new mother's room has been shuttered and hung with garlic, when an infant will not wake or will not be put to the breast. She hears what is said in the hours before dawn, when no one has the strength to dissemble. Eleanor learned to look for what did not fit, a cold hearth in a house with a fever, a cellar door kept barred, a labouring woman who whispered about a visitor at night. She wrote what she found in a small book in the back of her bag, and on Sundays she passed the entries to the family, who copied the ones that mattered into the White Ledger. Over forty years the little book recorded a surprising number of corners where the dark had been at work. In the Armada summer of 1588, a year after her father's death, she was the one who kept the women's side of the Wetherby watch. While the men stood at the beacon with their bills and their lanterns, she and a dozen neighbours sat up in a kitchen with the children, hot water, linen and a kettle, ready for any birth, any fright, any panic. Two women went into labour that night out of pure terror and both delivered safely, and Eleanor said she thought the Spaniards would have found the parish's confinements the stoutest line in Yorkshire. Nothing came from the sea. The same cannot be said of every season of her life. She never married. There were offers, a widowed miller and a harness-maker among them, and she refused each with the same gentleness and a firmness that shut the door. She said she was married to the work and that the work was a jealous one. In her thirties and forties she kept a neat house on the lane behind the market, with a bed for any woman who needed a place to lie in, a garden of motherwort, raspberry leaf and tansy, and a grey dog named for nothing in particular that was the grandchild of her father's. She was a spare, tall figure in a grey hood, with long hands, an unhurried walk and a calm that people spoke about for years: the sense that when she arrived at a bedside the worst was already over. Marion lived with her until her own death in 1610, a grumbling, sharp-witted old woman with a net-frame always at hand, and then she lived alone. She held the Faulkner and Towton quarrel to be a matter for men and ledgers. The White Ledger said that a Lancastrian had let the Guest through the line in the Wars of the Roses and the Red Ledger said the opposite, but she had delivered Lancashire children in her time, drovers' wives and travellers caught on the road in the wrong month, and she had found that a woman in labour has no allegiance but the child. It seemed to her a poor basis for a century of grudge. She said so only to her dog. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns gave her more work than she could do. She attended the plague houses when no one else would and boiled her linen in lye and vinegar afterward; she buried three apprentices of her trade; and she delivered, in the long winter of 1628, a sickly child to a family with no fuel and sat with them through three nights with her own coals. She took a cough that season, a chest cough that settled and did not lift. She delivered her last child in the new year and died in 1629, in her own bed, in the grey hood, with the little book beside her and a hawthorn stake in the bottom of the bag. Eleanor Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the midwife who watched the doors of Wetherby for forty years, daughter of the Steady Shuttle and as steady as he. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet watchers of the slayer family tradition: the women and men who never took up a stake, and who nevertheless kept the White Ledger honest by seeing, at the most fragile hours of a household, what no hunter could see from the road.