Grace Shackleton

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

When Grace Shackleton was carried home from the Wharfedale road in the year 1634, the people of Otley remarked that it was strange to see her lying still. She had been sixty-five, a shopkeeper's wife of long standing, and in all those years nobody had ever seen her sit through a whole afternoon. She was born in 1569 at Otley in Yorkshire, she kept the counter and the books of a small shop, and although she was never a slayer, she was the elder sister of one, and the White Ledger records her as the steadiest pair of hands the Shackleton household ever had. Her father, Percival Shackleton, born in 1547, was a wool-comber, one of the men who stood at the combing pots in the sheds behind the market and drew the long, oiled fibres through heated iron teeth, sorting the good wool from the short. It was hot, greasy work, done in a haze of steam and lanolin, and combers were a proud, clannish set who kept their own customs and their own saint's day. Percival was known as a steady man with a rough temper that he almost always controlled. Her mother, Grace Metcalfe, born in 1549, was a miller's daughter, and she gave her daughter both her name and her sense of measure. A miller's child grows up with weights, tolls and balances, and Grace Metcalfe raised both of her girls to distrust a scale that had not been checked. The family lived in a stone cottage in the lower part of the town, close enough to the river that the flood marks were painted on the doorpost. The Shackleton girls were two, born two years apart. Grace was the elder, and her sister Quenild Shackleton, born in 1571, would grow up to be the hunter of the family. In their childhood, though, the difference was merely one of temperament. Grace was bright, brisk and practical, the child who put the porridge on and counted the coins in the jar. Quenild was quiet and inquisitive and had a habit of vanishing for whole afternoons along the riverbank. Their mother put Grace in charge of the household accounts before she was twelve, and she kept them, in a careful round hand, in the back of a psalter, using a system of tallies and strokes that she devised herself. Otley in the 1570s and 1580s was a town of about a thousand people. On market days the streets were full of packhorses and cattle, and the inns at the top of Kirkgate did good business from the Leeds and Skipton roads. Religion was ordinary and enforced: the parish church of All Saints, with its Elizabethan homilies and its churchwardens who fined absentees, kept the calendar. A girl of the middling sort might learn her letters at the vicar's or from a neighbour, and Grace learned hers well enough that in her later life she could read a bill of lading and draft a letter of complaint with equal ease. Food was oatcake and cheese, bacon and pease, ale for the household and small beer for the children, and in the spring a stew made with the first nettles from the riverbank. The Armada summer of 1588 came when she was nineteen. The beacon on the Chevin was lit, and the men of the town went up to muster; Percival Shackleton, aged forty-one, was called for the trained band and returned after a fortnight, disgusted, with a sore foot and a story about a captain who could not tell his left from his right. Grace kept the shop of a neighbour through those weeks, a grocer and chandler who had been taken by the militia, and it was there that she found her calling in a different sense. She liked the work. She liked the sound of the door-bell, the arrangement of goods on shelves, the ledger pages in which every sale had its place. When the grocer returned he offered her a permanent position, and within some years, by arrangements that the ledger leaves vague, she became the wife of a shopkeeper of the town, whose name the family has always treated as a matter of no consequence. He was, by all accounts, a mild man who was content to let his wife run the business and who took the greater pleasure in the garden. The shop sold what a market town needed: candles, soap, salt, pins and thread, dried fruit, spice in very small quantities, tobacco after the fashion took hold, lamp oil, paper, rope, and every sort of small hardware. Grace ran it with a miller's daughter's precision. She weighed everything twice, wrote down every debt, and gave credit only to people she trusted, and the reputation this earned her was of a woman who was hard to cheat and hard to refuse. Her enemies, and there were a few, called her sharp, and her friends called her fair. In a period of rising prices, when the coinage was still recovering from the debasements of the previous century and the poor scraped for farthings, her shop was one of the few in the district that kept its measures honest. She never had children, a matter that the ledger records without comment, and she treated the daughters of neighbours and the apprentices of the town as if they were owed an education in arithmetic. Her sister's calling in 1592 changed the household in a way she understood quickly. Quenild came to her door one night from the towpath at Tadcaster, white and quiet, and Grace, who had been waiting up, did not ask her what had happened until the morning. When Quenild finally told her, Grace listened for a long time and then said only that the matter would need to be recorded properly. It was she who taught her sister the practical side of ledger-keeping, the method of dating and cross-referencing that made the White Ledger's Shackleton entries so clean, and it was she who, over forty years, quietly stocked the shop with what a hunter needed: hawthorn twigs bought from the hedge-cutters, lamp oil in bulk, waxed cord and spare flints. No customer thought it remarkable that a shopkeeper's wife should buy so much of these, and no clerk who audited her accounts ever asked what they were for. She kept in touch with the wider family as a matter of habit. She wrote regularly to cousins in Leeds and to the Proctor house in the West Riding, exchanging news of births and burials and the price of wool. In these letters she never mentioned the ledger directly, but she was careful to record, in her own account books, which of her sister's absences fell in which week, so that the hunts could be dated without a slip. The Proctors of Otley and Leeds regarded the Faulkners of Lancashire with a certain wariness, and Grace's view of the ancient quarrel was practical: the Guest had never been found, therefore nobody knew whose fault Towton was, and the sensible course was to keep good books until somebody did. The plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns tried her shop in the way that they tried every shop. The sickness of 1603 closed the market for a season, the cold of the winters of the following decades drove up the price of everything, and in 1621 the plague took a seamstress of the town whom she had known all her life. Grace stayed open through all of it, kept her doors bolted after dark, and sold camphor and vinegar at cost to those who could not pay. She buried her mother in 1617 and, the year before, her father Percival, who was sixty-nine, and by the time she reached her sixties the two of them had been gone for nearly twenty years. Her end was sudden. In 1634, at the age of sixty-five, she was riding home from a market at Ilkley on a wet afternoon when her horse slipped on a stony descent and threw her. She died of the fall, and the town closed its shutters for the funeral. Her sister Quenild had died seven years earlier, and the ledger, in a final small entry, records that the shop's accounts were found to balance to the last farthing. She is remembered in the Slayerverse as the counter behind the hunter, a vampire slayer's sister without a stake, whose ledgers were never wrong.