Gilbert Proctor

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

Most of what a cloth town knew about Gilbert Proctor it learned from the smell of him. He came home from the fulling mill each evening reeking of stale lant, wet wool and fuller's earth, a sour, mineral, unmistakable odour that followed him down the lane at Wetherby and made the dogs raise their heads. He was born there in 1522, in Yorkshire, in the stone house by the Wharfe that his grandfather Jeremy Proctor had made a sheep-and-lye household, and he died in 1590 of the sweating sickness, a sudden fever of the old English kind that had come back to the market towns and taken a sixty-eight-year-old fuller in little more than a day. In between he lived the steady, unremarked life of a craftsman in a slayer family, and that steadiness was exactly what the family needed. His father was Ambrose Proctor, a tanner, and his mother was Maud Hebblethwaite, a brewster whose ale was drunk in three parishes. The pair lived in the long shadow of the grandparents. Jeremy Proctor had been the shepherd of the fells who never took up a stake, and Agnes Barlow, the spinner of Richmond who became the vampire slayer called The Wary Bell, had died two years before Gilbert was born; he grew up among her spindles, her tally-sticks and a sealed bundle of papers that no one was permitted to unwrap without washing their hands. Ambrose tanned hides in pits behind the house, so that Gilbert's childhood was divided between the smell of bark and the smell of malt. He had a sister, Bridget Proctor, born three years after him, and a younger brother, Humphrey Proctor, born in 1529, who would be the vampire slayer of the family. Gilbert was the eldest and the one on whom the arrangements of the household fell, and he took to them without complaint. He was apprenticed to a fuller, and the trade suited him as few things suit a person. Woven cloth came off the loom loose and greasy and had to be scoured, beaten with heavy wooden stocks driven by a water wheel, stretched on tenter frames in the meadow, raised with teasels and sheared. A fuller handled every bolt of cloth that passed through the parish and he handled it for days. He learned who was weaving what, who was behind with his debts and whose cloth came in with a stain that was not grease. Gilbert had a fuller's patience and a fuller's hands, broad, cracked and permanently stained a faint yellow, and he also had a quality that his grandmother would have recognised: he noticed small irregularities. A thread out of true, a bolt a half-yard short, a man who paid his reckoning in an odd coin. In a slayer family such a habit is worth more than a bow. In 1547 he married Cecily Metcalfe, a chandler from Richmond whom he had met when he went to buy candles for the mill and stayed to argue about the price of tallow. The match was talked about in the lane for a month, since a Wetherby fuller marrying a Richmond candle-maker seemed to the neighbours an unusually foreign arrangement. Cecily brought a vat, a set of moulds and a head for figures. Together they raised three children: Lancelot Proctor, born in 1548, who became a vampire slayer in his turn; Dorothy Proctor, born in 1551; and Anthony Proctor, born in 1555. The household was loud, warm and permanently smelling of both wool and wax. Gilbert, who was a gentle man with a dry sense of humour, taught the children the names of the cloths and the days of the fulling year, and told them nothing of the ledger until they were old enough to be trusted with it. The ledger, in his case, was not a slayer's tally but a clerk's duty. The White Ledger had been opened by Walter Proctor, the White Clerk, in 1455, and the Proctors who did not themselves hunt were its caretakers, the copyists, the witnesses, the people who kept the entries dry, the pages in order and the secret secret. Gilbert wrote a good hand, learned from his mother's cousin the notary, and he spent winter evenings copying fresh entries from his brother's rough notes onto clean sheets, signing as witness, checking dates against what the parish registers recorded. He never swung a stake in his life, and he said so with neither shame nor pride. The entries, he used to say, were the only part of a hunt that could be argued about afterwards, and the family had better make sure it was done right. The Faulkners of Lancashire kept their Red Ledger with the same care, and every Proctor child was taught that somewhere over the Pennines another family held a book that claimed the Guest had slipped through the line at Towton because a Proctor let it pass. Gilbert thought the whole quarrel was a matter of two sets of accountants who had never compared their sums, and he regretted that no one would ever be allowed to try. His middle years fell across the years of religious upheaval under the Tudor crown, from about 1549 to 1560, when the church services changed more than once, rood screens went up and came down, vestments were hidden and brought out again, and no neighbour could be sure what a priest might be told to say next Sunday. Gilbert kept his head down and his accounts clean. The mill belonged to the parish's chief landholder and the cloth went where the cloth was always sent, and he held that a fuller's job was to deliver a good bolt regardless of the liturgy. But the upheaval had a private cost. The old burial customs were disturbed, graves were moved, and certain churchyards that the slayers had watched for generations were suddenly changed or neglected. His brother Humphrey came to him in those years with long lists of places where watching had lapsed, and Gilbert made the lists into entries and the entries into a quiet map of the parish that survived him. The rising of the northern earls in 1569 and 1570 was a harder season. Wetherby lay on the road along which men marched, and some of the parish went with the rising and some stayed behind, and when the thing collapsed in the winter there were reprisals and a long hush in the market. Gilbert was in his late forties and not a man for politics, but a fuller sees every coat that passes through his yard, and he knew who had been where. He did not inform on anyone and he did not boast of what he knew. He kept the White Ledger in a locked chest beneath the tenter-frame loft, where no searcher would look, and at the height of the troubles he sent his wife and daughter to Richmond for a month, in case the household should be searched. It was not, but he kept the habit of caution for the rest of his life. Cecily, who ran her own trade and never pretended otherwise, was the quiet partner in everything. She dipped candles in the front room and he scoured cloth in the mill, and in the evenings they sat over the day's takings and the ledger, a pair of sharp-minded people with no illusions. When Bridget was left unmarried and increasingly lonely after a long spell of spinning, Gilbert made a place for her in the household, and the two of them quarrelled amiably about the price of yarn for thirty years. When Humphrey died in 1572, Gilbert was the one who wrote the last entry in the slayer's own ledger and sealed it, and for some weeks afterwards he could not bring himself to speak of it. He grieved, as he did most things, by working harder. As his sons and daughter grew he steered each toward a trade. Lancelot, who showed an early fascination with the family's other business, he did not discourage, but he made the boy learn the mill first. Dorothy went into the household economy and proved so shrewd that the neighbours came to her for advice, and Anthony, the youngest, turned out to have the steadiest hands in the family and was happiest with the shears. Gilbert took a quiet satisfaction in seeing them settle. He had no ambitions beyond a sound house, a sound wheel and a sound ledger, and by the time he reached his sixties he had all three. The sweating sickness found him in the late summer of 1590. It came to Wetherby on a wet wind, as it was said to do, and took him in a day and a night: a chill, a drenching sweat, a drowsiness the doctor could not break. Cecily sat with him through it. His daughter Bridget had died of the same sickness six years before and he had seen what it did, and he spoke calmly at the end, giving instructions about the chest in the loft and the accounts in the mill-house, and asking only that the ledger be checked once more by someone with a sharper eye than his own. He was buried in the churchyard at Wetherby, within sound of the water-wheel. Gilbert Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the fuller who kept the books straight, the one who held the White Ledger safe through changes of religion, a rising and a plague without ever carrying a weapon. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet craftsmen of a slayer family, the ones whose clean copies, careful witness and locked chests allowed the hunters to be believed long after they were gone, and whose faith in plain accounts outlasted the age of the Wars of the Roses by a hundred and thirty years.