Judith Ripley

Spouse of Gervase Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Judith Ripley sold cloth to the city of York, and to half of Yorkshire beyond it, for nearly forty years and could tell from the feel of a bolt in the dark whether it had been woven in Halifax or Kendal, a skill that served her well on the nights the family business was not about cloth. She was born in 1583 in York, the daughter of an ordinary household with no slayer blood in it, and she married into the Proctor family in 1606, becoming the wife of an apothecary and the mother of a vampire slayer. She died in 1645 of the sickness that followed the siege of York, a few months after her husband and her sons, and she is remembered in the White Ledger as the one who held the house together when it was coming apart. She grew up within the walls, in a tall timbered house in the streets near the river, among the cloth trade that had made York a prosperous city before the Stuarts and kept a good part of it solvent afterwards. Her parents were respectable and unremarkable people, and they placed her young with a draper of their acquaintance, where she learned to measure by the ell, to judge a weave against the window, to keep a day-book and to tell a customer no without losing the sale. By twenty she had a small stall of her own on the ground floor of a rented house in Petergate, and a reputation for fair measure that outran her years. She was a brisk, neat, fair-faced woman with an exact memory for faces, and she was never, anyone agreed, easily imposed upon. She met Gervase Proctor, the apothecary in the rear half of the same house, over a dispute about the lease. The disagreement was brief and polite and left both parties thinking better of each other than they had expected. Gervase was a Wetherby man, five years her senior, a quiet and careful person who spoke rarely and weighed his words as he weighed his powders. Judith liked that. She had known loud men all her life and found a steady one a relief. They married in 1606, and the shop front and the shop behind were joined thereafter in a single household, with a stall of linens and woollens at the street side and a counter of jars and mortars at the back. What she was marrying into she learned in stages, not all at once. She knew within a year that her husband's family were unusual, because there was a book in the house which no one but the family might touch, and a lantern on a hook in the back room that was not for lighting a stair. She knew by the second year that the book was called the White Ledger and that the Proctors were what they called a slayer family, a Yorkist house that had been hunting vampires since the first battle of St Albans in 1455. Gervase told her himself, one evening in the winter of 1607, in the plain way he told her most things, sitting across the kitchen table with the candle between them. She listened, asked three questions, and then asked whether it would interfere with the Saturday trade. He laughed, she recalled later, for the first time in a week. It did not interfere with the trade. It did, in a way, improve it. A draper hears everything: who has bought black cloth in a hurry, whose servants are leaving, whose cellar has been bricked up, who has suddenly started to buy sacking. Judith heard it all across the counter and carried it up the stairs to the ledger room every night. She told Gervase which family had stopped coming to church, and which landlord had asked for lead sheeting by the yard, and which widow had begun buying shrouds for a household that had no corpse. Gervase wrote down what she said, and the White Ledger of those years carries the marks of her good ear. Between them they made a kind of intelligence service out of a haberdasher's gossip, and nobody in York suspected a thing. Her three children arrived in turn. Lambert Proctor, born in 1608, was a grave, watchful boy who studied the weave of a cloth as if it were a text. Hester Proctor, born in 1612, took after her mother in everything, quick with the needle, quick with her tongue and quick with a sum. Bartholomew Proctor, born in 1615, was the youngest and the dreamer, always scribbling on the backs of bills. Judith raised them in the Petergate house in the plague years and hard winters of the early Stuart reigns, when a cough in the street sent the neighbours into their houses and a death in the parish made the whole city hold its breath. She boiled vinegar and burned juniper, she kept the children away from the river, and she sat up through two fevers, one of them Lambert's, without ever admitting that she was afraid. She was fiercely, quietly protective of the boys. She did not want Lambert to be a slayer and said so, once, to Gervase's face, in the kitchen, with the door shut. It was the only serious quarrel of their marriage. When Lambert took up the work in 1632, called on a lonely road when a coach arrived with a driver and no passengers, she did not forgive the ledger and she did not forgive her husband's family, for the better part of a month. Then she went to the cupboard, took out a length of good dark wool, and made him a coat with deep inside pockets, lined so that a pistol could be carried without a bulge. She said nothing about it. He understood that it was her blessing and her condition, both at once. The civil wars found her at the height of her competence. She kept the drapery going while armies marched about the county and prices doubled, buying cloth from wherever it came, selling to officers of both sides, and being very careful to say nothing at all about the King or Parliament. In the early months of 1644 she laid in what stock she could, filling the cellar with salted meat and the loft with sacks of oatmeal, because she had read the news from the north correctly and knew what a siege would mean. When the armies closed round York in April, her cellar fed the house and half the street. She saw the siege through from the front. She saw the shops shut and the suburbs burn. She saw the corn run out and the cats disappear. She saw her husband working long past his strength in the shop behind her own and her son Bartholomew helping him in the evenings. She saw Lambert go out on errands she did not ask about, and come back with a face that told her more than she wanted. In July came the battle on Marston Moor, a few miles off, and the surrender that followed, and in the weeks after that her husband died and her sons with him. She sat with the three of them in turn, and arranged the funerals in a city that could scarcely bury its dead, and sold the last of the black cloth to pay for the coffins. Her daughter Hester kept her going through that winter. The two of them lived in the shop with the shutters half closed, and at night Judith would take down the White Ledger and read the old entries by candle, searching, her daughter said, for a precedent. There wasn't one. In the spring the sickness that had followed the siege, the fever that raged in the crowded streets, took Hester, and after that it took Judith too. She died in 1645 in the room above the shop, in the bed where she had borne her three children, with the shop bell silent below her. Judith Ripley is remembered in the Proctor family as the draper who married into a hidden war and made herself indispensable to it, the woman whose good ear and good stock kept a slayer family fed and informed through forty years of plague and siege. In the Slayerverse she stands for the strength of the household, for the people outside the hunt who do not carry a stake but carry everything else, and for the sort of courage that measures twice, buys in time and sews the pocket for the pistol without being asked.