Gervase Proctor

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

Gervase Proctor spent his working life weighing small amounts of dangerous things on brass scales, and the habit of exactness he learned at the counter followed him into every other part of his life. He was an apothecary of York, born in 1578 at Wetherby in Yorkshire, a man of the Proctor blood who never took up the work of a vampire slayer himself but lived his whole life inside a slayer family and kept its accounts, its secrets and its medicines. He died in 1644 of the siege of York, in the last weeks of a summer that the city never forgot, at the age of sixty-six. He was the elder child of Lancelot Proctor, born in 1548, a notary's clerk, and Philippa Rishworth, born in 1553, a cloth-seller. Lancelot was known in the White Ledger as The Cold Lantern, a vampire slayer who did his hunting after the day's copying was done, and the name was earned: he was a thin, unhurried man who carried a shuttered lantern everywhere and was never seen to hurry, even on the night his own boy followed him down to the river by mistake. Gervase had a sister, Prudence Proctor, born in 1581, who would teach the children of Wetherby to read. The household in which the two of them grew up was a small stone house near the market place, with a room for Lancelot's papers, a room for Philippa's bolts of kersey and say, and a back kitchen that smelled in autumn of drying herbs, because Philippa had a gift for simples and sold more cough syrup than cloth in a bad winter. From his mother, then, Gervase took his first lesson in what a plant could do. From his father he took the second, and it was harder: that the family had a duty beyond its trades, and that the duty was written down. Lancelot kept the family's entries in the White Ledger in a clerk's hand, and as a boy Gervase was permitted to blot and sand the pages. He read, long before he understood them, the old accounts of Walter Proctor, the White Clerk of York, who had been called at St Albans in 1455, and the entries for Towton in 1461, where the ledger insisted that a vampire the family called only the Guest had slipped through the lines because a Lancastrian slayer let it pass. The Faulkners of Lancashire, he gathered, kept a Red Ledger that told the story the other way round. Nobody in Wetherby had ever settled the matter, and Gervase learned to hold the argument the way his family held it: as a standing contest of tallies and reputations, courteous, unresolved and never violent. When the Wars of the Roses were a century gone the quarrel had become a kind of family weather. Gervase was not called. The family understood, without the matter ever being pressed, that some children carry the mantle and some carry the lamp for those who do, and Gervase became the second kind. He was apprenticed in his teens to an apothecary in York, in a narrow shop in Petergate under a sign of a gilt mortar, and there he learned to grind, to distil, to weigh by the grain and to write a label so that a frightened servant could not misread it. He liked the work more than he had expected. He liked the order of the drawers, the blue and white jars, the bitter smell of wormwood and the sweetness of liquorice root, and he liked being the man to whom people came when something was wrong in the body and they were too proud or too poor to say so to a physician. The years of his apprenticeship took him through the plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, and he learned the other side of the trade, which was that an apothecary is the last person in the street to be thanked and the first to be blamed. In 1606 he married Judith Ripley, a draper of York, born in 1583, who ran her own stall of linens and woollens on the ground floor of the house where the two of them afterwards lived. It was a business marriage in the best sense and a love match as well, though neither would have used the word aloud. Judith kept the shop front and Gervase the shop behind it, and when a customer wanted a plaster and a yard of ribbon in the same visit the family got the full price of both. They had three children: Lambert Proctor, born in 1608, who became an apothecary's journeyman and in time the family's vampire slayer; Hester Proctor, born in 1612, who became a seamstress; and Bartholomew Proctor, born in 1615, who was bound as a scrivener's apprentice. Gervase raised them in the Petergate house with a quiet firmness, and with a rule that nothing was to be written down in the shop that could not be read aloud in the ledger room the next day. Those were not easy decades. The years from 1603 to 1625 gave York successive visitations of plague and a run of winters in which the Ouse froze at the staithes, and the apothecary's counter became the place where the city's fear was measured. Gervase did what he could. He sold fumigants and rue, he boiled vinegar in an iron pan to cleanse the shop air, he turned away no one who could not pay on the first day, and he kept a separate small book, in his own cipher, of the cases that did not look like plague at all: the throats that had been opened with a neat double wound, the sleepers who woke pale and aged, the cellars where the lamp would not catch. Those he carried to his father when Lancelot was alive, and after Lancelot died in 1611 he carried them to the family elders, and eventually, once his son had taken up the work, to Lambert. The cipher book is the reason the White Ledger of those years is so rich in medical detail, and it is one of the things the family counts as Gervase's own contribution. He was a cautious man in company and a stubborn one at home. He disliked the quarrel between King and Parliament that spread across the north in the early 1640s, thinking it bad for trade, bad for the sick and bad for a family that kept a ledger which had to be able to pass through every army's checkpoint unread. When the civil wars split the northern gentry he kept his opinions behind his teeth, sold his physic to both sides, and wrote nothing that could not be shown to a captain. His wife thought him too careful, his daughter thought him too tender, and his son Lambert, who knew more of the night than either of them, thought him the bravest man in the house and never said so. In April 1644 the armies closed round York and the siege began. The city was shut within its walls, its suburbs burned, its bridge held and its provisions counted out. Gervase kept the shop open when other shopkeepers shut theirs, because there were wounded to be dressed and there was fever in the lower streets. He ground bark, boiled lint, made poultices with the last of the honey, and slept sitting up on a stool by the door so that he could be woken at any hour. His younger son Bartholomew helped him in the evenings, and his elder, Lambert, was often out on errands that Gervase did not ask about. Philippa's old recipes, which Gervase had never lost, were taught again to the neighbours, and the shop became for a few months a kind of parish dispensary. The summer broke the city's spirit. The battle on Marston Moor in early July was fought a few miles off and the aftermath filled York with wounded and with rumour, and the terms of surrender that followed, in the middle of July, found Gervase already ill and worn out. The siege took him in the weeks that followed, and he died in 1644 among the jars and the scales, in the house in Petergate, with his wife beside him. His sons, as it fell out, died in the same year, and his daughter and wife did not outlive the following one. For a man who left no marked grave, Gervase left a good deal behind. The cipher book passed to the family's keeping and its entries were copied into the White Ledger by the hand that carried it out of York that summer. The shop was closed. The sign of the gilt mortar was taken down, and nobody in the city could say afterwards where it had gone. What the family remembered was the order of the place, and the sense that when the world went wrong there was one house in Petergate where the labels were legible. Gervase Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the lamp-bearer of a slayer family, the apothecary who kept the medical record of the night without ever raising a stake against it, and the patient father who made a vampire slayer of his eldest son by having made him honest first. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet craft that sits behind the fighters: the measured dose, the careful label, the book kept in cipher and the door left open for anyone who needed help, however sinister their trouble might turn out to be.