Wetherby in the 1520s was a market town on the Great North Road, where the traffic between London and Scotland crossed the River Wharfe by a stone bridge, and Kit Dewhurst was born there in 1526 to a family that worked cloth by the old finishing trades. His father owned a share in a fulling mill on the river, one of the water-driven stocks that pounded woollen cloth in troughs of warm water and fuller's earth until the fibres felted and shrank into a dense, weatherproof web. Kit grew up with the thud of the wooden hammers in his bones. He knew the hot reek of stale urine kept in barrels for scouring, the fields of tenter-frames where the wet cloth was stretched to dry on hooks, and the thistle-like teasels that raised the nap. It was, he later said, a trade that gave a man wet hands all his life, but never an empty stomach.
The religious upheaval of the Tudor crown reached him in his teens as a matter of neighbours and money. The Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 had stirred Yorkshire to its roots, and the aftermath was a heavy hand from the king's officers and a suspicion between households that took years to settle. As the abbeys were dissolved and their lands sold, the wool merchants of the county fretted about supply, and the fullers who worked their cloth fretted about payment. Kit was apprenticed young, at thirteen, to a master fuller at Wetherby who had a reputation for hard work and evenhanded wages. By twenty he was a journeyman, and by twenty-three he had leased a small mill of his own on a mill-race outside the town. He was a quiet, square-built man with reddened forearms and a deliberate way of standing when spoken to, as though he expected to be asked for a weight or a price and wished to be ready with it.
His household in those years was crowded and cheerful, and the guildhalls and wool markets of Yorkshire were the theatre of his working days. He carried finished cloth to the Thursday market at York or to the halls where the merchant adventurers bargained, and he learned to read a buyer's face as well as a bolt of broadcloth. It was at York, in the minster close, that he met the woman he would marry. Joan Proctor was thirty-two when they wed in 1553, older than most brides, and by every account she was formidable. She kept books with the neat hand of a notary's clerk and had a reputation in the close for never being cheated by a chapman. She also belonged to the White Ledger, the Proctor tally of vampires taken during and after the Wars of the Roses, and she was a vampire slayer in her own right, though she said little of it in company. Kit learned of it slowly, the way a man learns that a river he has crossed all his life has a deep side.
He took it with the same solid calm he brought to everything else. Joan told him plainly, on the evening before the wedding, what she was and what the family kept, and she gave him the chance to withdraw. He looked at his hands for a while and asked only whether the mill would be in the way. It was not, as it turned out; a fulling mill grinds through the night when the water is good, and a man tending it can be found at any hour without anyone wondering. Kit became, without ever being called such, a keeper of the family's cover. When Joan came home late with mud to the knee, the mill-hands assumed she had been visiting sick neighbours. When strangers came asking for lodging they were bedded in the loft above the stocks, and no one remarked on it. He stitched no cloaks and cut no stakes. He simply stood in the door of the mill and made it the most ordinary place in Wetherby.
Their marriage was short but fertile. Lawrence Proctor was born in 1554, within a year of the wedding, and Godfrey Proctor followed in 1557, and then Blaise Proctor in 1558. The youngest, Kit Proctor, was born in 1560 and named after his father. By the custom of the family the children took their mother's name rather than his, and Kit Dewhurst raised no objection, saying that a Dewhurst was easy enough to come by and a Proctor was a thing worth being. The household was loud and close, the four boys tumbling over one another among the sacks of fuller's earth, and the older ones were set early to turn cloth and haul water. Godfrey, a watchful, still child, would become a vampire slayer in his own turn. The other three would follow different paths, and their father, a man of few opinions about the future, encouraged all of them equally.
The years of his marriage were the years of Queen Mary, and then the first years of Elizabeth, and Yorkshire went through them like a boat through a chop. Churches that had lost their altars had them rebuilt, and then had them torn down again. Kit paid his tithes, said what the vicar said, and put his silver where it could be found. He took some pride in the fact that his cloth was bought by men of both persuasions, and that he had never once been asked to declare which sort of Christian he was before he was paid. Prices rose, and a full purse became a thinner one in the space of a season, but the mill held its own. In the White Ledger these years appear in Joan's neat hand, and here and there in the margins a line about the mill and the reliable man who ran it.
The illness that took him was a slow one. In the winter of 1560 he began to lose weight and strength, and by the spring he was pale and sleepless, unable to lift the great wet bolts he had handled for two decades. The physicians of York called it a wasting illness and offered no cure, and the apothecaries sold expensive syrups of no use. He died in 1561, aged thirty-five, with his youngest son barely a year old. Neighbours remembered that the mill stood silent for three days, the only time in living memory that the water was left to run to waste, and that the men of the town came to the door with their caps in their hands.
His widow took up the mantle in the White Ledger that year and carried it for twelve more, until her own death in 1573. The White Ledger records that she never forgave the illness for taking her husband and that she never blamed him for leaving. Kit's four sons grew up under a mother who was both parent and hunter, and each in later life spoke of their father as the calm in the house that had made the rest of it possible. In the wider tradition of the Slayerverse he is remembered as the fuller of Wetherby, a man who never carried a stake but who kept the mill door open, and whose steadiness allowed the Proctor line to survive one of its most uncertain generations.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
