Jane Proctor

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

Jane Proctor was born in 1527 in Tadcaster, a Yorkshire town of pale limestone and quick brown water, where the River Wharfe ran under a long bridge and the quarries on the hill above supplied stone for the great church at York. The family house stood near the market, a timbered dwelling with a fishmonger's slab in front, because her mother Parnel Kershaw sold river fish and salted herring from a stall in the square. Her father, Robert Proctor, was a very different sort of person. He was the younger son of the Tudor marriage of 1486, the one who had taken his mother's name and the Yorkshire lands that went with it, and the town knew him as a careful man with a ledger under his arm who assessed rents and measured land for the lords of the district. In the family's private memory he was a vampire slayer called The Tadcaster Assessor, and his neat habits of reckoning and record were as much a part of that name as any hunt. The household in which Jane grew up was busy, damp and full of talk. She had two elder sisters. Parnel Proctor, named for their mother, was born in 1512 and was already a young woman when Jane was a baby, and Joan Proctor, born in 1521, was a fierce, tall girl who would become a hunter of the White Ledger in her own right. Jane, the youngest by a wide margin, was raised partly by her sisters and partly on the stone flags of the fish-stall, where she learned early to count coins, to gut a pike, and to hold her tongue when a customer asked awkward questions about her father's night-time comings and goings. The Proctors were a household with two lives, and the children were taught which of them to speak of. The White Ledger was kept in a chest that was never named, and the girl was old enough to know its outline before she was old enough to be told its contents. The religious upheaval of the Tudor crown broke over her girlhood. In 1536, when she was nine, the Pilgrimage of Grace swept through the north, and Tadcaster men marched to join it or wished they had, and afterwards the king's officers came to remind the county who ruled it. The monasteries fell one by one, and the abbey lands were sold to gentlemen who had never before owned a Yorkshire acre. Robert Proctor's work as an assessor became busier and more dangerous, for he stood between the old tenants and the new owners, and his daughters learned to hear the raised voices of men who felt cheated. Jane took from it a certain wary shrewdness. She understood that a household at the edge of a great argument keeps its counsel, keeps its accounts, and keeps its door on the latch for the neighbours who might one day be needed. She learned her trade in her teens. Carding was the process that stood between shorn wool and spun yarn, and it was performed by women and children in cottages across the West Riding. A carder took the greasy fleece, which had been washed and oiled, and worked it between two boards set with hooked wire teeth, drawing out the tangled fibres until they lay in a soft, even roll ready for the spinning wheel. In some places teasels were set into the boards instead of wire. It was skilled and tiring work, sore on the shoulders and rough on the hands, and it paid by weight. Jane took to it. She had a light, strong wrist and a patience for the small repeated motion, and by her late teens she was carding for a clothier in the town, earning a few pence a day and a bundle of oil-soaked rags to wipe her fingers. She was known for a clean roll, a quality that bought her a modest name among the spinners who depended on her. In 1546 she married Miles Shackleton, a carter on the packhorse roads, and the match was as unlike her mother's romance with a fish stall as one could imagine. Miles was a lean, weathered man from the high country who hauled loads of wool, salt and lead along the tracks between Tadcaster, York and the Pennine market towns, and he knew every ford and every alehouse on the way. He was also a vampire slayer, though not of any named house. He had come to the craft by accident, on a night-road above the dale, and a man who spends his working life alone with a string of horses in the dark is well placed to notice what is wrong with the night. Jane met him when he brought a load of fleeces to the clothier she carded for, and Robert Proctor, who had already marked him as a useful ally, was quietly delighted. It was, in a sense, an alliance of the Ledger and the road, and Jane understood that from the first. Her mother Parnel Kershaw had died in 1544, and her father died in 1546, the very year of her wedding, so Jane was married with no parent at the door. Her sister Joan gave her away, and the feast was held in the fish-stall's back room, with herring and rye bread and ale from a neighbour. The couple made a home in a narrow house near the bridge, with a stable yard for Miles's horses and a bench under the window where Jane carded in the light. Their son Percival Shackleton was born in 1547, and their daughter Thomasin Shackleton followed in 1551. Percival would live to see the end of the century and beyond, and Thomasin to see her twenties end. Neither took up the craft of their father, though both grew up knowing its outlines, because the house had no way to hide it. When a carter comes home at midnight with a torn sleeve, his children learn to sleep through it. The years of the young marriage were turbulent ones for the county. Under Edward and then under Mary, the parish church changed its clothes twice, and Jane, like her neighbours, learned to be present at each service and silent in the pew. Prices rose and wages lagged, and a carder's few pence bought less each year. She kept the household afloat with her carding, a share in her sister's earnings, and a small plot of beans. Miles was often away, and the White Ledger notes that he took a number of vampires along the packhorse roads in those years, marked in a spare hand as taken by the carter. She was proud of him, but not blind. She scoured his cuts, mended his coats, and forbade him to speak of the road at table. In 1558 he died. The ledger records only that he did not come home from the moors, and the family were told he had been taken on the fells by the thing he hunted. Jane was thirty-one. She went back to her cards the next morning, because the wool would not wait, and she raised her two children on a widow's wage from then on. Those who knew her described her as a woman who had aged a decade in a week, and who never again wore anything but grey. She worked until her hands would no longer close. Jane Proctor died in 1568 at the age of forty-one. The parish clerk wrote in the register that it was of old age, a phrase so plainly absurd that the family long kept the page as a curiosity, since it took a certain grief and a certain toil to make a woman of forty-one appear old to a neighbour. Her children lived on, and Percival in particular kept the memory of the house by the bridge, the wire-toothed cards and the dark line of the Wharfe. In the story that has grown up around the Slayerverse, Jane is remembered as a working woman of the White Ledger's outer circle: the daughter of The Tadcaster Assessor, the sister of a hunter and the wife of one, who held together what the road and the night kept threatening to pull apart.