Heloise Proctor

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

Heloise Proctor spent her life at a loom, and it is the reason the White Ledger's cadet branch survived a decade in which most paper was unsafe to carry. She was born in 1492 at Selby, in the Yorkshire lowlands on the River Ouse, where the abbey's great church rose above a flat country of reed, osier and water meadow. Her father, Jeremy Proctor, was a shepherd who worked flocks on the fells for the abbey's grange and came down to the Ouse levels when the winter hills were closed. Her mother, Agnes Barlow, was a spinner, and also the vampire slayer known as The Wary Bell. Heloise was the second child, following a brother, John Proctor, born in 1491, and the family was a cadet branch descended from Walter Proctor, founder of the White Ledger in 1455. It kept a small and nearly invisible corner of that ledger, and its life ran from the hill pastures to the river quays, in a country where the road often meant the difference between a hard winter and a survivable one. Her childhood was made of fleece. The Proctor household lived in a two-room cottage of timber and daub, with the sheep in the yard and the wool in the loft, and smelled permanently of lanolin, peat smoke and wet dog. Shearing came in June, and the whole family worked at it, Jeremy holding the ewes, Agnes bagging the fleeces, the children picking burrs out of the wool. Afterward came the washing in the beck, the carding with wooden combs set with teasel, and the spinning, which was her mother's craft and, at that time, nearly every woman's second job. Agnes could spin a thread so even that a merchant once mistook it for machine work, though there were no machines. She never spoke about her other occupation in front of the children. Heloise knew by seven that her mother went out on certain nights with a hawthorn stake in her sleeve and a small bell in her hand, and by ten that her brother John would follow. She knew too that she would not. She was apprenticed to a weaver at thirteen, in a shed near the abbey gate. Weaving demanded a strong back and a mind able to hold a pattern across ten thousand throws of the shuttle. The warp was stretched on the loom in a task that took most of a day, and the weaver worked the treadles and the batten with her hands and feet in a rhythm that a stranger would take for a dance. Cloth was sold by the ell, and the Yorkshire trade was large enough that a competent weaver could always find work. Selby had no craft guild strong enough to bar a woman from the loom, unlike York, and Heloise took every job she was offered: coverlets, kersey for the abbey servants, linen for shirts. Her master, an old man with a cough and an eye for a tight selvedge, said she was the fastest apprentice he had seen and the worst at flattery. She was tall and spare, grey-eyed, with long hands, and she moved with the economy of someone who had never been in a hurry in her life. The thing that made her useful to the family was the selvedge. A woven edge can carry a pattern, a fine sequence of coloured threads that reads as ornament to anyone who is not looking for meaning. Agnes had wanted a way to send tallies between Proctor households that a bailiff or a stranger could not read. Heloise devised one: a code in which a run of dyed threads stood for a number, a pair for a name, and a dropped stitch for a warning. It was not a cipher that would have defeated a scholar, but it needed no paper, no ink and no seal, and it could travel as a coverlet, a horse blanket or a length of trimming. For thirty years the cadet Proctors of the Ouse and Derwent sent their tallies to the White Ledger's keepers in bundles of cloth that no customs man in Yorkshire ever thought to unroll. Heloise was proud of it, in her spare way, and kept the pattern-book in her own head. She never married. It was not for want of offers, which the neighbours recalled with some annoyance, but because she saw no reason to trade a loom of her own for a share in a man's. Her father Jeremy, who was easygoing, said she could please herself. Her mother said it more firmly. Her brother John, a slayer with a hard and cheerful nature, teased her about it for decades and left her his good boots when he set out on a hunt he did not expect to survive. She took lodgers, rented a second loom and trained two girls, one of whom, a spinner's orphan, stayed with her until the end. She was, in the words of a York merchant who bought her cloth for thirty years, the only person in the county who could not be beaten down on price and who never once tried to beat anyone else. The Flodden campaign in 1513 took her father's neighbours and half of Selby's young men north, and the town was quiet for weeks. Jeremy, too old for the muster, stayed home with the sheep, and Heloise, at twenty-one, wove the black bands that the widows wore. That was the first time she understood that her work would carry a weight beyond cloth. Her mother Agnes died in 1520, of a winter chest, after a life spent hunting by night and spinning by day, and Heloise buried her under the abbey wall with a bell laid in the coffin. Jeremy followed in 1534. In the years between, she kept his flock with the help of a hired boy, and put the family's accounts in order, the sheep and the other kind. The northern risings that followed the dissolution of the monasteries came very near Selby. In 1536 the rebel host under its lawyer captain gathered on the roads around the town, and the abbey, which had fed the district for four centuries, was dissolved and its church left standing for the parish. Heloise saw the great treasures carted away and the roofs of the outbuildings stripped for lead. She wove through it all, as she did through the religious upheaval that followed under the Tudor crown: the English Bible, the stripping of the shrines, the boy king's prayer book and then, with Queen Mary, the Latin Mass restored, all within twenty years. She kept her own counsel on each turn and her doors open to friend and stranger. She was one of a great many northern women who lived through the century by adjusting the loom to the weather, and did so without sentiment or complaint. In 1557, at the age of sixty-five, the plague came up the Ouse on a barge. It is possible it was carried on wool. Heloise nursed her orphan girl through it and took ill herself a week later, dying at home in the room with the loom. She had no children, and left the shed, the two looms and her tools to the girl, with a note that the selvedge pattern should be taught to whoever wanted it. The White Ledger records her death in a single line. The pattern outlasted her, passing from weaver to weaver in the Ouse country, and was known among the cadet Proctors as Heloise's edge for another hundred years. In the Slayerverse she stands as one of the people who never held a stake and made the hunters' work possible: a weaver who wrote the dead into the edge of a cloth and sent them home.