Hester Proctor

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

Hester Proctor could set a sleeve so that it hung true on a man who stood crooked, and she could do the same for a story, which made her useful to a family that lived by what it did not say. She was a seamstress of York, born in 1612 in the city, a Proctor of the Yorkist line and a daughter of a slayer family, and she died in 1645 of the sickness that followed the siege of York, the last of her brothers' generation and the last of her father's children to hold the house in Petergate. She never married, and she left no children, but she left a great many mended things, and a ledger of stitches that was more than it seemed. Her parents were Gervase Proctor, an apothecary, and Judith Ripley, a draper, and the household she grew up in was a double one: a counter of jars at the back and a stall of cloth at the front, joined by a staircase and by a pair of busy, clever, observant adults. Her older brother was Lambert Proctor, born in 1608, who was to become a vampire slayer, and her younger brother was Bartholomew Proctor, born in 1615. Hester was the middle child and the only girl, and she grew up with the particular watchfulness of a person who is neither the first nor the last. She was quick, tart-tongued and impatient, and her mother's face on a smaller scale, though with her father's gift for stillness when the occasion required it. She learned to sew at her mother's knee, among the offcuts of the drapery, and by nine she could hem a napkin, by eleven turn a collar and by fourteen cut a bodice from a paper pattern without wasting an inch. The trade was an excellent apprenticeship in other things. She learned to read a customer by what she asked for, to measure a body at a glance, to hold a pin between her lips and a conversation in her head, and to remember a face from one season to the next. Her mother, who valued these gifts, gave her the key to the cloth store at sixteen, which in that household was a distinction. She was shown the White Ledger at the same time as her brothers. Judith did not approve at first, but Gervase insisted that a family that kept a secret in three-quarters of its members was keeping it in none of them. Hester read of St Albans in 1455 and of Towton in 1461 and of the vampire the family called only the Guest, and the lasting disagreement with the Faulkner family of Lancashire over who let it pass. She found the whole business, she said, rather like a quarrel over a boundary hedge: tedious in detail, immovable in principle and perfectly capable of lasting another century. She was right, as it turned out. She understood her family well. Hester was not called, and did not envy those who were. Her task, as she saw it, was the supply. She made Lambert's coats and mended them when they tore, and she turned the leather roll that held his hawthorn stakes into something that did not look like a roll of stakes, with an apothecary's label on the outside and a lining of oiled cloth. She lined her mother's good dark wool with a hidden pocket for the sealed ledger. She worked out, over some months, a kind of sampler in which the colour of a thread and the direction of a stitch stood for the entries of the night, so that a piece of embroidery on the wall of a respectable parlour was, to anyone who knew, a record of cellars that had been cleared. It was a Yorkshire custom, she liked to say, to hang a text over the fire. She hung several. As a seamstress she worked in other people's houses, which was the best intelligence gathering a family could have. She was admitted to the bedchambers of the rich and the kitchens of the poor, she measured girls for wedding gowns and old women for shrouds, and she heard what was said when a person is standing on a stool with their arms out and cannot easily leave. She noted who was gaunt and who was pale, which doors stayed shut in the daytime, which households ordered mourning for someone nobody had seen buried. These notes went into the family's records by way of Lambert's lined pocket, and more than one cellar was cleared in the 1630s on the strength of a seamstress's observation about a hem. The civil wars made her work scarcer and her days harder. Fewer people ordered new clothes, and more wanted old ones turned, and the soldiers of both sides wanted shirts and breeches and bandages in quantities that no one could supply. She took on the garrison's mending in the winter before the siege and worked through the dark months by the light of a single tallow dip, with her mother in the room below and her brothers in and out. She said little of the quarrel between King and Parliament, because the wars had split the northern gentry in a way that split her customers too, and a seamstress who was seen to favour a side lost a great many fittings. The Proctor family, she thought, could manage perfectly well on the side of the White Ledger. In April 1644 the armies closed in on York, and she lived through the siege with her family in the house in Petergate. She cut up the unsold cloth for dressings. She ran messages for her father's shop, carried hot water to the sick on the lower streets, and sat up with children whose parents were too ill to nurse them. She kept her brother Bartholomew's spirits up with a stream of sharp remarks as he copied in the evenings. In July the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles from the walls, and the surrender that followed brought a grim relief and a worse winter. Her father died that summer, and her brothers with him, and she made the shrouds herself, because there was no one else to do it and because she would not have it done badly. The sickness that followed the siege, a fever of crowded cellars and short rations, ran through the city all that winter and into the spring, and she nursed the neighbours through it with her mother until she could not do so any longer. She died in 1645, within a few months of her brothers and her father, and her mother followed her. She was thirty-two. Her last piece of work was a small sampler that she finished in her final week and hung over the shop door, a plain row of crosses and the date, which the neighbours took for a memorial text and which the family understood very differently. Her stitch-key, the table that explained what each thread and stitch stood for, had been copied into the back leaves of the White Ledger before the siege began, and so it travelled out of York with the book that summer. It is the reason the family can say with any confidence which cellars were cleared in the years she lived. Hester Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the needle behind the stake, the seamstress who made the slayer's coats, lined the slayer's pockets and stitched the night's tally into the household walls where nobody would think to look. In the Slayerverse she stands for the craft of the unnoticed hand, for the people who keep a hidden war supplied and recorded, and for the quiet defiance of a woman who would not let a shroud be badly sewn.